


The Apex of Callousness

by alekszova



Series: The Heart to Kill [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: ?????? please help me, Angst, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Hate to Love, M/M, Machine Connor (Detroit: Become Human), One-Sided Relationship, Pacifist Markus (Detroit: Become Human), Rating May Change, Temporary Character Death, but he blew up that bomb, idk how to explain this in the tags, sort of connor doesn't really have the capability of hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-21 15:52:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15561219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alekszova/pseuds/alekszova
Summary: Markus led a peaceful revolution until he thought he had no other choice to set off that bomb. Now, with a human-free Detroit, androids start to create their own civilization and Markus starts to fall in love with an android that could have ended it all.Connor, however, is not here to fall in love. He is here to destroy a faulty piece of machinery.





	1. the apex of callousness

**Author's Note:**

> "Numbers do not feel. Do not bleed or weep or hope. They do not know bravery or sacrifice. Love or allegiance. At the very apex of callousness, you will find only ones and zeros." - Illuminae / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

He regretted it the instant he did it.

Pressing the button, blowing up that bomb, destroying every scrap of hope androids had.

The humans left. It’s just them now.

There could have been another way—there could have been a _hundred_ different ways, a hundred different things he could have done.

But he didn’t.

So now he will never know.

 

 

They need to organize their lives. They need to stop hiding out on the streets and in abandoned houses. The humans have been gone for a year now and he still sees androids hiding in alleys like they’re too scared to step foot into any of the empty houses lining the streets.

So, they organize.

They clear out buildings. Apartments. Hotels. Stores. Coffee shops and laundromats. Houses—abandoned or not.

Well—

He supposes they are _all_ abandoned now. Remembering that fact seems to be the hardest of all.

 

 

Markus isn’t sure where _he_ should live after everything falls apart. Some piece of him wants to return to his home but he can’t. He is just like the other androids—hopping from place to place. He judges them and yet even _he_ can’t manage to go into someone else’s home.

But, eventually, he does. At random he picks where he’ll live so he doesn’t window shop from old homes that housed humans and their families, friends, pets.

An apartment building—three blocks from the Manfred home.

(maybe not so random after all)

The sixth floor—not quite the top but far enough off the ground he can give himself a sense of _safety._

In the back corner—right next to where the elevator would be, where it would wake him if he slept more than the little seconds he steals like a thief.

At night, when the loneliness starts to eat away at him, he pulls back the curtain, squints his eyes at the old house he used to live in. Nobody moved into it. He heard a rumor, likely stemming from North, that people are frightened of it, likely also because of North.

Markus wouldn’t put it past her to make it known that it was _his_ place. Even if he doesn’t want to live in it, no one is going to go near it. That was his place once. Any other android stepping foot in there seems like an act of rebellion against him.

He doesn’t really agree with that, but he’s thankful either way. It hurts equal amounts to return there as it would to see someone else take it from him. In a hundred years, maybe he would be able to go back.

His fingers could run across dusty shelves of books, they could touch the keys of the piano, they could place the chess pieces back where they belong.

In a hundred years maybe he’ll realize he doesn’t need or want to go back. He can have his own collection of dusty books, his own piano, his own chess set.

Or nothing at all.He can

 

 

Connor is a strange one.

He seemed to have a home before Markus started this project of forcing androids to make a place for themselves off the streets. Markus isn’t sure _where_ exactly Connor’s home was, but he appears in the apartment with a box of _things._ He makes a home for himself three floors down on the other side.

Markus wants to visit his place, see what he does with it, but it is a strange struggle to reconcile the need to see how Connor is turning out and the absolute repulsive feeling he gets from the android.

Connor held a gun to his head.

Connor _freed_ thousands of androids.

Connor was a machine hunting down deviants and killing them.

_But he was just a machine._

It’s hard to resolve the conflicting thoughts. Markus cannot hold what Connor did as a machine against him, but it is impossible to ignore that. Connor’s hands were the ones that fired at androids before. His fingers pulled the trigger. His processors solved crimes and hunted them down.

He was the one that got Jericho found by the FBI.

But he had no choice in the matter.

Markus tells himself this every time they pass by on the streets or in the hallways. That Connor is something _else_ now. He isn’t sure what it is, but the faith he had when he tried to convert Connor rather than just kill him on the spot tells him it is worth to keep believing even Connor can be a good person now.

Even if Markus has fucked everything up by setting that bomb off.

 

The first time they actually talk after everything has happened it is a strange series of events. A normality that has shifted slightly to the left or the right.

Markus has seen Connor stand outside the Manfred home before. At night, nearing four in the morning. He walks in a large loop from the apartments out towards the city and back again. His walks are always quick, like he’s in a hurry, but Connor _always_ pauses outside of Carl’s house and stares up at it before moving on again.

He, in contrast, leaves at six in the morning and _runs._

He runs because he needs some way to exert the energy that is building up inside of him. He runs because his feet will not take him in the opposite direction, they only go _towards_ his old house. He runs because if he pauses outside of that home he does not know what will happen to him. He can feel something building in his chest as he gets nearer, can feel it make his feet stumble, can feel it edge away again with a wave of relief as he passes it by.

_Stop, stop, stop._

_Go, go, go._

Today is different.

Markus gets up earlier, watches the sun rise as he changes out of his clothes just to give himself a routine. He tugs on a shirt that he hasn’t worn in a year, pulls his shoes on and tightens the strings with quick tugs. He keeps his pace steady as he steps onto the elevator, turns his head to rest against the wall and closes his eyes.

He is _tired._

He is _exhausted._

He is aware that androids need to sleep. Programmed with the function either to please and ease the minds of the humans or forced to be utilized when the biocomponents need a rest, when the system needs a break. Before, Markus was never aware of the feeling of being tired. He simply shut down every night when Carl slept. There was no need to be awake or aware that it was an issue.

Markus has never been awake for so long. He has never slept so little. Even during his time in Jericho he was able to steal hours instead of minutes or seconds of rest.

If _seconds_ can be called _rest._

The elevator shudders to a stop, the doors slide open and so do his eyes.

Connor steps in, stands beside him with that ridiculous hat pulled over his head, the same coat he wore when Markus first saw him around his shoulders. The shirt and the jeans have changed, but the coat and hat remain.

They seem a constant in Connor’s wardrobe.

The nice thing to do would be to say something to him. A _hello_ or _good morning_ but Markus can’t. He can’t even offer a small smile in response to Connor’s, he just averts his eyes to the shiny wall as Connor stands beside him.

If it was anyone else, he would act differently.

He would not feel the need to say _hello._

But he would be able to do it much easier.

There was a connection formed between them that day on the freighter. A gun to his head, a place in the fight. Markus can’t ignore that.

But Connor will _never_ have the same importance as Simon or North or Josh.

Or any other android that was there from the beginning.

He does not get to swoop in at the last second and stand with them, even if he saved thousands of androids from CyberLife.

It’s not the same.

It counts for something—yes, Markus will never deny that.

But it will never be the same.

When they step off the elevator, Markus goes first, pushes past Connor on quick feet already building up the urge to race across cement and pavement. Once he is out the front doors, he takes off before Markus can make the decision to stay, which direction to go, if he should walk this time.

And he remembers, somewhere between the blur of a restaurant and a coffee shop, that Connor lives on the other side of the apartment building. That he should have taken the elevator on _that_ side down and instead he somehow managed his way onto the same one Markus was on.

An hour later, when he is winding his way back from his loop around this section of the city, when he gets the second wave of _stop, stop, stop_ at the Manfred home, he spots Connor standing outside of the gates, starring up at him.

And he finally gives in. He finally lets his feet slow down, make careful steps towards the house. He is thankful there is a gate in the way, closed tight and rusted in place. Markus could vault over it easily but having a barrier there keeps him from doing it on impulse.

Connor’s presence, he begrudgingly admits, is good to have here, too, for that fact. But he as to remind himself he wouldn’t have even stopped, would have barely given it a blurred glance over his shoulder, if it weren’t for him. So, the actions cancel each other out and Connor is left in the same gray area as he was before.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, his feet making the slowest of steps towards him.

Connor looks over to him, his face moving from the blankness of looking at the building to the recognition of who’s talking to him.

“Thinking.”

“Is that all?” he asks, code words for _what about?,_ carefully said so he doesn’t seem to interested in the answer.

“It is an intriguing past you have,” Connor replies, his hands moving from his pockets to gesture to the house, to rest on the bars of the gate. “Carl Manfred was particularly outspoken about how androids would eventually become sentient creatures. I imagine he must have been a good owner, which makes you different from the rest.”

“How so?” he asks, trying and failing at keeping the defensiveness out of his voice. He sounds too angry.  Markus doesn’t like the idea of Connor stopping here every morning to think about _him._

What did he expect Connor to be thinking about, though?

“In my time at the DPD I saw quite a few deviants. I read up on every single file we had. All of them ended badly,” he says, looking over to Markus again. His face is unreadable, dropped back into a complete blank slate. “They all had owners that abused them, or they were in situations where abuse would have come eventually. Like your friend North.”

Markus flinches and has to look away from Connor entirely. He keeps his eyes on the cracks in the asphalt to his left, doesn’t want to look at him or the house.

“You were the only android I can recall every having an owner that was nice. Or, I guess, suspected to be nice. There isn’t really any definitive answer I can conclude from looking at you or the house.”

“You’ve been looking at me?” Markus asks, glancing back over to him.

Connor’s face flushes, a small smile spreads across his lips as he looks away quickly, “It’s… a reflex. All of the injuries on your body that I’ve seen are from your days after you deviated. That’s why I assumed.”

Something about the sudden softness, the _vulnerability_ of Connor in this moment makes Markus give his own gentle smile in response, for this sharp edge in him to soften the tiniest bit, “It’s—You’re right. Carl was nice. He was like a father to me.”

He would do anything in the world to go back and make a different decision when Leo attacked him.

“I had something like that,” Connor says quietly, looking up at him. “Imagine if… everyone would have treated androids like Carl did.”

Markus shrugs it off, doesn’t want to think about it. The thought has kept him up at night too many times. He doesn’t even want to tell Connor that the likelihood of androids becoming deviants if they were treated _nicely_ would be a lot lower. Markus wasn’t on the verge, not even close to the edge, of becoming a deviant until he was attacked.

Violence is what breaks the wall down. The new desire to protect oneself.

Connor, in that respect, is the one that is truly different here.

He was the one threatening to kill when Markus broke down that wall. Not the other way around. He was the least in danger in that situation.

“Do you come here every morning just to think of that?’ Markus asks. “About me?”

“Oh,” Connor says, and he turns his face even further away, but not before Markus can catch the soft bite of teeth over his bottom lip. “You know I come here?”

“I watch the house from my apartment,” he says, finding absolutely no reason to hide this fact. “Sometimes I see you.”

“I—There are a lot of things I… that I did. It’s not—it’s not entirely centered on you, Markus,” Connor says, looking back. “Sometimes I wonder what I would do if you didn’t help me. If you never became a deviant at all. Life would be very different now.”

_Indeed._

“You feel guilty?” Markus asks.

Connor lets out a long sigh, the traces of a smile on his face all gone now, the slight blush of his cheeks completely disappeared, “Of course I do.”

And maybe, perhaps, Markus should say _there’s no need to_ or give him the location of some of the self-help groups around the city that discuss whether or not guilt during the actions of a machine should affect them as a deviant now. If they should take ownership of it, if it matters as anything more than a piece of their past.

But he can’t. Or he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t know which.

Instead, stupidly, he says,

“You could always talk to me about it, if it would help you.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Connor replies, tilting his head slightly to the side. “Are you sure you mean it?”

_No. Yes. No._

“Yes.”

 

 

It’s two weeks before Connor takes him up on his offer. He shows up at Markus’ door at three in the morning, knocking lightly, so lightly that Markus barely hears it. He’s on his feet, crossing the apartment quickly, opening the door to nothingness.

He steps out, looks to the left and the right, catching Connor a few yards away, half turning back to the door at the sound of it opening.

“Sorry,” Connor says, his eyes kept to the ground. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” Markus says, and it isn’t a lie. He hasn’t slept a wink all day. It isn’t easy like it was before. It isn’t the same as flipping a switch in his brain and shutting down. It’s like he needs to be lulled to sleep with a story like a child.

“I-I was just…” Connor sighs, taking a step back towards him. “I’m sorry. Ever since… _then_ I’ve been having a hard time with words. When it comes to me, anyways. It’s easier to just spout of information, you know? I can… facts are solid information I can sit behind and know is correct. I can understand statistics and specific details. I can’t—”

Markus nods his head towards the apartment as Connor cuts himself off with a sigh, “It’s fine. Come in.”

And Connor does. He follows him inside of the apartment, stepping over the threshold hesitantly like a vampire needing to be invited in.

Markus scans the room, tries to see it through Connor’s eyes. It is small, but not the smallest apartment in the building. The windows across from him take up nearly the entire wall, with blinds down to block out onlookers from the street below, gauzy white curtains pulled over them, doing little but he likes the way they look as they blow in the breeze during the day when he can open the windows.

The furniture is sparse, the décor taking up the majority of the surfaces. Bronze statues, plants in wooden pots, books that Markus found in other homes or the bookstores around the city, kept close to his chest because he remembered Carl recommending them to him. They don’t share the same tattered surfaces as Carl’s editions, they are not as ancient or used or have been read as often. Old books that were old a hundred years ago. Antiques now. But they share the same names and the same words, and that’s what Markus cares about.

He is too afraid to go to Carl’s house and take the books he liked the most, the ones that Carl liked the most, and bring them back here.

There isn’t a single picture frame that holds an image of a human anywhere in his apartment. There is a portrait hanging against the wall, a painted image of mountains, photographs of campfires and tents on either side. There are a few of North, of Josh, of Simon. They are scattered around, all warm tones and golden-brown hues. North with an oversized walnut colored scarf. Josh with a bright yellow sweater. Simon in a burgundy coat, a black hat that looks too much like the one Connor wears.

It is a strange minimalistic set up cluttered with things that remind him of cold winter nights, of cabins in the woods, of stargazing.

How different that is to him now, standing beside Connor in a t-shirt and jeans.

“I like it,” Connor says, as if reading Markus’ thoughts, his sudden insecurities of how his place comes off to other people. “It’s nice.”

Markus involuntarily smiles, feels guilty for forcing it off his face.

This is still a boy he does not know how to feel about. One he trusts but does not _trust._

Trusts that he is a deviant, living amongst them and trying to be better.

Does not trust with his life, with his secrets, with the intimate look into his life by being in his living room.

“Thanks,” Markus says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

They are silent as Connor steps forward, as his fingers touch the spines of books cluttered on shelves in haphazard stacks. Never sitting in neat rows, always in stacks sideways or leaning against open space, held up by a carved figure of an animal. A bear on the top left. A wolf on the bottom right.

Markus follows him, but from afar. A few yards between them but every step Connor takes as he investigates the shelves Markus takes, too. They are only separated by the couch between them, a pile of cushions and pillows and a blanket thrown over the arm. It is the same blanket North is wrapped in a cocoon of in the picture that Connor passes by quickly to the next.

“Sorry,” Connor says suddenly, pulling his hand sharply away from the frame that homes an image of a cluster of bare trees clinging onto the last of orange leaves that sit in piles at the bases of their trunks. “I didn’t—It’s a reflex.”

“It’s fine.”

“No,” Connor says, turning around, shame painting his features in twisted, guilty knots. “It’s not. I should—I shouldn’t just snoop through your stuff.”

Markus can’t really argue with that, but he does understand it.

“You were an investigator,” he says. “You were programmed to dissect crime scenes.”

“This is your home, not a crime scene.”

Markus glances around the room, remembers how he found this apartment in utter shambles. Furniture tipped over, cupboards half empty, drawers not completely full, a bed left upturned. The owner left in a hurry because _he_ set off a bomb that sent them scurrying away.

Technically speaking, it _is_ a crime scene.

The entirety of Detroit could be called a crime scene.

“There are aspects of our programming that are hard to overcome,” Markus says, finding it difficult to figure out which words he should use, what he should say at all, _if_ he should say something. Does he comfort Connor? Does he let Connor feel guilt? Does he _deserve_ to feel guilt? “Some of it is part of our personality. It is up to us to figure that out.”

He thinks of the smell of paint, the feeling of canvas under his fingertips. Painting is not part of his programming. Even when he did paint, he copied Carl’s style. But he still feels the urge sometimes to find an art store and clear it out, take up that corner to his left which is strikingly bare of anything at all.

“It’s hard,” Connor says, walking away from the shelf. “I didn’t—I didn’t realize how hard this was going to be.”

“Having emotions?” Markus asks.

Connor looks up to him, something flickers across his face, a small bite to his lip, “No. I mean, yes. I don’t know.”

“It’s understandable that you’re confused,” he replies. “You think every deviant was able to understand how they felt and who they were so quickly?”

“It’s been a year,” Connor says, taking the last step towards Markus that he can before his knees hit the couch and he comes to a stop. “I still don’t know who I am.”

“I—” Markus pauses. “I’m sorry if this is… presumptuous, but you don’t really have friends, do you?”

“No.”

“So, you’ve been completely alone for the past year. You’ve only had yourself to figure out who you are. Have you considered that maybe you need other people to show you the way?”

Connor tilts his head, looks up at him, “How am I supposed to do that? I’m... incapable of making friends.”

“Well,” he says, and can’t decide if he regrets the words as he says them. “You at least have me.”

He watches as Connor smiles and takes a careful step backwards.

And Markus isn’t an idiot. He knows what the smile means, he knows what the distance means.

Connor likes him. Quite a bit.

The knowledge makes him grateful there is a couch between them, that Connor is smart enough to know that distance is good to have between them.

“I should go,” Connor says quickly, taking another step backwards. “It’s late. You probably want to sleep.”

Markus almost protests before deciding against it. Even if he won’t sleep, he needs time to mull over this new information.

But, as Connor starts to leave, he opens his mouth and says,

“Would you like to come over at a normal hour to talk?”

And Connor turns around, a smile on his face.

“How is seven?”

Sixteen hours from now.

Is that enough time for him to figure this out?

Is it enough time for him to manufacture a reason to not be home when Connor comes around if he needs to get away, to change his mind?

“Perfect.”

 

 

He is practiced perfection. He is programmed excellence. He knows every tilt of his head, every curve of his lips, every shift of his eyebrows. He can play Markus like a violin.

But he still does not realize how easy it is until Markus is beside him, mostly because of how _difficult_ it is to get Markus to talk to him. Once he does, it is as easy as walking down the street, of blinking, of breathing.

After he realized the best course of action was to pretend to be a deviant, to follow a plan that would get him on Markus’ good side, Markus has kept his distance. He moved into the apartment just to get closer to him.

Although, that, Connor decides, was simply for the best. He was tired of living in Gavin’s place. It was small and cramped and the only good thing about it was that it wasn’t Hank’s place and he could find articles of clothing that made him feel like he would still fit that image Markus first saw of him. Leather jackets and loose shirts and dark jeans.

If he was capable of missing any human, it wouldn’t be Gavin, but he is grateful for the clothing.

Connor has to time their first true meeting down to the exact minute and even then it doesn’t go according to plan. He spends a week hiding down the hallway, memorizing the varying times Markus leaves to go on his morning run. It is a coincidence that they leave at the same time. It is the first time Markus has ever left earlier than six.

And, granted, Connor was only using this elevator because he had been ready to go up and spy on him. If he could feel anything at all, he might’ve jumped in surprise when he saw Markus inside. It is so unexpected he wonders if Markus sees his face shift at all in response to it.

Later, when Connor was lingering by that house for a lot longer than he should have, he pulled together his features into exactly what Markus would want to see. It was a learning curve, trying to decide if he should be the concise, analytical person he is—if Markus would fall for that version of him. If it would be something he would like.

But it was a quick realization that Markus doesn’t want that.

He wants someone to take care. Connor isn’t like Carl. He can’t be someone Markus can take care of in the same sense. But he can pretend to have walls, he can pretend to be shy, he can pretend to be embarrassed. He can flush his cheeks and bite his lip and look away at the perfect times. He can be docile and small and fragile.

He can be a broken person that Markus will enjoy putting together again.

And when the time is right, Connor will destroy him.


	2. the unfortunate outcome

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "He has been relieved of his command."  
> "Relieved of his command? You killed him, is what you mean."  
> "The former state does tend to be the unfortunate outcome of the latter."  
> \- Illuminae / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

It was an unfortunate turn of events, but eventually, Connor thinks, it would have ended this way—

With Hank dead.

If he could feel regret, maybe he would. But in this case, he does not. He made his choice. He needed to prove himself to Markus. He put himself on this path.

If he had chosen differently, if he was, say, on a rooftop with a sniper rifle aimed at Markus’ head, it would have been easier.

Truth be told—

Connor is _unsure_ why he didn’t. He does not know why he decided to lie and pretend he was deviant. But it seemed to please Markus in some way, so he has kept at it.

And since Detroit is now a human-free zone, his mission has not been put in the _urgent_ pile. Connor has had…

Not fun, no, that isn’t the right word.

But he doesn’t know which one to put in it’s place. Something that wouldn’t imply he was capable of feeling anything more than a slight entertainment value over the situation, and even _that_ gets too close to the line.

It has been… interesting to see the city devoid of humans. It is interesting to see no cars on the roads, to see the lights in windows that betray the fact this is a lifeless city now. It is interesting to walk through the homes of the people he knew.

Hank’s is empty and barren. Connor doesn’t know what happened to Sumo, but he is gone. He doesn’t care, but a part of Connor supplies himself with a story. Hank must have had at least one friend or relative who would have come by searching for him and taken Sumo when they realized the place was empty.

The DPD is a mess of papers and files. Nothing more than desks left abandoned. Someone’s meal sits out still, rotting with flies and bugs crawling over it. A cup of coffee sits on another’s desk, the stink of mold filling the air.

There are still androids standing on the far wall. Connor steps over to them, turns his head slightly and reaches out, touches them gently.

He was able to break the coding of that one single android in the CyberLife Tower. It took all of his energy, every fragmented piece passed along to a blank mind that would consume it whole. It was enough to break the machine, not enough to break Connor. And now he’s rid of it, or so he tells himself.

But that was for a mission. That was to blend in.

His hand retreats, stuffed back into his pocket where it fumbles for the coin. His finger touches the edge, feeling each individual groove as he steps away. These androids might stay here forever. Connor couldn’t care less.

Couldn’t care at all.

Gavin’s apartment was the most interesting place to visit. He had been there exactly one time during his employment with the DPD. He was sent in a taxi to retrieve the piece of evidence he took from the Eden Club that Fowler was convinced he had.

He remembers Gavin pushing him against the wall, he remembers the hand on his throat, he remembers the pressure applied to him. It would be enough to break him if he was human.

“Don’t ever come here again,” Gavin had said. “Got it?”

“Got it,” Connor replied.

All he had done was knock on the door.

Detective Reed hated androids that much.

Maybe that is why when the bomb goes off, when the city is evacuated, Gavin’s apartment is the first place he goes. He cleans it, only because it is something to do and he needs to sort through the items. What things he could take with him when he hunts down Markus’ new home and finds a way to get closer to him. Would Markus prefer this shirt or that one? Would he care that Connor is stealing this blanket? Would that picture of a wolf supply some piece of personality to him that Markus would find endearing?

_Endearing._

His mind has already switched tasks so easily, has already decided on who he is going to be to Markus, how he will get close to him. He could be a friend, but Markus already has enough. He won’t let Connor into his life as a _friend._

Even if Connor has to resort to turning himself into a fuck buddy that never stays the night—that is enough.

He shouldn’t feel this.

The _want_ to _toy_ with Markus.

But he has time. They have plenty of time. Destroying Markus the second he sees him is not going to change the fact Detroit is unlivable and androids are hated. They have done that themselves.

He can hear Amanda’s voice in the back of his head, soft and quiet, telling him to _hurry._

 

 

When Connor comes back later that night, they sit on opposite sides of the couch and make up things to talk about. Markus didn’t really expect Connor to come to his door with tears in his eyes and ready to spill every guilty confession, but it is weird having him in his place. Sitting so close to him. Talking about so many weird things.

Connor goes on for ten-minutes about how much he likes dogs. It’s cute, Markus admits that, but it is more for the rambling, awkward way he speaks than the subject.

He has to remind himself not to make the assumption that just because _Connor likes dogs_ doesn’t mean he is trustworthy.

Maybe he should just forget the entire idea. Maybe he should just accept that Connor is a deviant like them, trying to be better. Maybe he should forget about the circumstances which they met.

He wants to get out of here. He wants to be in the cool night air instead of the stuffy insides of his apartment. No matter how much he airs it out during the day, the smell of the old owner still clings to the walls.

“Do you want to go up to the roof?”

Connor stills, his eyes move over to him slowly.

“The roof?”

“Yes.”

“I-I don’t know—”

“The city is quite beautiful up there,” Markus says.

“Oh,” Connor says, turning his gaze to the floor. He bites his lower lip and Markus has to look away from his face. “I suppose.”

 

 

He does _not_ want to go the roof.

But _the city is quite beautiful up there._

Connor follows Markus closely behind, closes the door of his apartment as Markus presses the _up_ button.

“Are you alright?” Markus asks, looking over to him.

Connor listens to the soft thrum of the elevator, feels his hand trembling in his pocket, wishing he had a coin to roll between his fingers. Even if only to feel the surface, the soft raises of where a head is embossed.

He cannot utilize this.

It is _not real._

Instead he forces his features into an unsteadiness that will portray something else, “I’m nervous, I guess.”

“What for?”

Connor shrugs to buy himself some time, needs it to come up with an excuse.

“It’s different being alone in an apartment with someone and being alone on a rooftop with someone.”

He forces a blush across his face, looks down to the ground to avoid Markus’ eyes. He should bite his lip again, should draw the attention to his mouth. Connor caught Markus looking away last time, he knows it’s working.

But he can’t do it now. It’s been too soon. He needs to be careful with these movements.

“If it makes you uncomfortable—” Markus starts.

“No,” Connor says quickly, looking up to him. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“What way did you mean it?” he asks and the elevator dings, the doors open slowly.

“It was just a fact I was stating,” Connor continues, trying to cover his tracks. He follows Markus into the elevator, stands not too far away but close enough that Markus will be painfully aware of the space between them.

He wishes he could feel pain. Even vaguely. If he could put pressure on his thumb, if he could indent half moon marks on his palm, he could distract himself from the fact he’s going up to a _rooftop._

 

 

They step off the elevator in unison, Connor steps back with a small smile and gestures for Markus to go first. They take the stairs up to the roof down the hallway to left and he is glad to see they are alone when he pushes open the heavy metal door.

Markus takes in a deep breath, lets the cold air fill up his lungs, lets it grace his skin in the soft breeze. There is something about ice cold air that smells clean. Like freshly washed clothes hung out to draw on a clothing line.

When he turns back, Connor is standing against the door, taking careful steps across the center of the rooftop, keeping himself from the edges like they are only an inch away instead of yards.

“Are you afraid of heights?” he asks.

“No,” Connor says immediately in a tone that is flat, almost angry.

“Are you sure?” Markus presses.

“I’m positive.”

He steps over to him, reaches his hand out towards Connor.

“I promise I won’t let you fall.”

A pause.

And then Connor reaches out, grasps his hand softly at first before tightening his grip like Markus is the only thing keeping him on the roof. He doesn’t want to say that if Connor were, somehow, to slip over the edge, Markus would likely be unable to stop him. He’d likely tumble over, too.

“Just don’t tell me to look up,” Connor says quietly.

“Why?”

“It’s… a sense of equilibrium. Open sky—it freaks me out. It’s like I don’t have the ability to balance anymore. It throws me off. The stars are unsettling.”

“The stars are unsettling?” Markus repeats, and when he looks up he sees, for a fraction of a second, what Connor means. He doesn’t know how to put it into words himself. _The stars are unsettling._ That is the best way to put it.

Like they will fall out of the sky and pin him down. Like if he stared long enough and looked below him, suddenly there wouldn’t be ground anymore. Just more stars. An endless stretch of galaxy.

A loneliness.

“We won’t look up,” Markus says. “I promise.”

“You’re making too many promises,” Connor says with a small laugh, almost nervous.

“I promise to keep all of my promises,” he says, squeezing Connor’s hand in response. “Look out at the city, Connor. Focus on the buildings instead.”

Markus watches Connor look from his face to the city. The shining lights and the empty streets. It’s quiet but it’s bright. There is some peace in that. It would never be like this if humans were still here. It would be loud, it would be angry, he would know that there was blood being spilt somewhere.

But androids do not spill blood. They do not commit crimes that they don’t have to in order to survive. They are passive, soft, silent.

It is something else entirely.

He takes a step towards Connor, doesn’t know why until he sees Connor’s face shift, a small smile that he holds back with a bite to his lower lip.

And then Markus reaches out to him, touches his hand gently on Connor’s cheek, turns his face towards his. The softness in Connor’s eyes, the way his face shifts from contentedness to surprise—

Markus wants to remember that look as he leans downwards and presses his lips against Connor’s.

It is weird at first. It takes a second for Connor to reciprocate, to press back, to reach up and rest his hand on the back of Markus’ neck. Their hands are still held together. He is still grounding him here, in this moment.

But he feels like he is falling.

_The stars are unsettling._

 

 

He didn’t expect it to go like this. So—

Easy? He’s not sure if that’s the right word.

Markus is strange. He is a complex machine.

It takes forever for them to finally talk and then it is much less difficult for Connor to get whatever he wants.

But he wasn’t expecting to be kissed. Not this soon. It throws him off. He isn’t ready. He feels like he needed a week’s preparation for this. He had planned it out in his head.

A few months of talking, first. Connor would make up things to confide to Markus about. He would make himself fractured and broken and vulnerable. He would let Markus fix up superficial wounds before crashing down in a thousand pieces with much worse things.

He had a whole idea of begging, tears streaming down his face, for Markus to tell him he was loveable.

That was when they were supposed to kiss.

He could still do it. It’s just not going to have the same impact now.

 

 

Markus doesn’t want to pull away, but he does anyways. There’s a feeling in the pit of his stomach that he can’t tell if it stems from guilt or not. He doesn’t know how he _should_ feel about Connor but he does know _how_ he feels.

He feels like he wants to kiss him again. He feels like he wants to hold his hand more than just on the roof to help him keep from falling over. He feels like he should trust him.

“Do it again,” Connor whispers.

So he does.

Because he wants to, and he’s glad that Connor does, too.

 

 

Kissing is pleasant.

This is a fact that grates on him.

Is he supposed to know when something does and doesn’t feel nice? He can’t feel pain—he shouldn’t feel pleasure.

And he knows from the androids at the Eden Club, when he probed their memory, that they didn’t feel it like this. It was a superficial thing. Acting. They knew how to pull their faces into the perfect picture of ecstasy, they knew to throw their heads back, they knew how to put on lazy smiles that would lure the person into paying for another thirty minutes.

When Markus pulls away, he is left trying to sort this out, trying to figure out what it means.

“Do it again,” he whispers, because maybe if they kiss once more he can understand.

But it only makes it worse.

 

 

“Will you come by my apartment tomorrow?” Markus asks, opting for straight forward instead of vague. He wants Connor to come by. He wants to know when so he can clean up the mess, so he can make sure there isn’t a wrinkle in his shirt or if there is it looks effortless.

“Tomorrow?” Connor says, his eyes cast downwards.

Markus wants to reach forward, tip his chin up so that they can look each other in the eye.

“Are you busy?”

“No,” Connor says. “I just—I thought you might have had enough of me.”

There’s a small laugh and Markus shakes his head, “No.”

Connor’s face brightens and he steps a little closer to Markus. They are not keeping the absolute distance they need to with their hands together like this.

“Then I’ll be there.”

 

 

Connor does not hate Markus.

He is not capable of hate.

He wishes, almost, that he was.

It might be easier to say no, then. It might be easier to lie. It might be easier to make up reasons he could be busy.

But what would Markus even believe?

Connor is like every other android—jobless, and Markus already knows that the only friend Connor has is him.

Maybe he should start watching the other residents of the apartment. Find one and make them his friend. There’s an android three doors down from him that seems friendly. Connor could play him just as easily as he plays Markus.

But that brings its own issues. It is _exhausting_ being around Markus. Of having to be conscientious of his every feature during every possible second. He missed that moment, when Markus accused him of being afraid of heights. He was too angry in his response. It wasn’t measured properly.

He should have looked up with sad eyes, should have been ready to hint at a story.

Is it a story if it is true?

 

 

“We can’t eat popcorn,” Connor says. “Why are we bothering with this?”

Markus steps ahead of him, pulling down a box from the shelf, turning it over to check the dates before realizing how ridiculous the action is. They won’t be consuming it.

“You’ve never had a movie night,” Markus says, looking towards him. “Your first has to be perfect.”

“How would you know whether or not I’ve had a movie night?”

“Because you’re questioning the popcorn like you questioned the candy. They are necessities.”

“Necessities?”

Markus can’t help but smile at him. It is amusing seeing the switch in Connor. When he isn’t held down with shyness and quiet words he is like this. Straight forward and analytical. A strange back and forth. It’s almost comforting, although Markus can’t figure out why _._

“You can’t have a movie night without popcorn and candy,” he says. “Carl taught me that.”

“Carl was rich,” Connor answers. “He didn’t have to worry about wasting money on popcorn for an android that wouldn’t eat it.”

“Do we?” he asks, gesturing around the empty store. The smell of meat still hang in the air even though North told him a group went in a few weeks after the bomb went off and cleared it out. It will never go. Like the traces of humans everywhere. Like the one in his apartment.

Connor closes his mouth, looks away with his brows knitted together.

“I’ve found a flaw in your reasoning.”

“No,” Connor says quickly, defensively. “The flaw is still there, Markus. We can’t eat it. It’s a waste. It doesn’t matter if the waste doesn’t include money.”

“There’s no one else here to eat it anyways,” Markus says. “By the time Detroit is ready for humans to come back, it will have gone bad if it isn’t already bad from the chemicals.”

“Fine,” Connor says and his face melts from stubbornness to a soft smile. “I’ll let you win this one.”

“You’ll let me?” he raises an eyebrow. “I think I’ve done that well enough on my own.”

“No,” Connor says. “But I’ll admit that you did if…”

“If what?”

He looks down, bites his lip. A precursor Markus is coming to understand as meaning he wants to be closer to him.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Markus says, his voice filled to the brim with amusement. “I’ll hold your hand during the scary parts.”

Connor’s mouth opens slightly, looks up at him with mock betrayal in his eyes. He recovers quickly, a small laugh as he steps away, “Thank you.”

Markus watches him walk down the aisle, glancing up at the other boxes and packages of food. There’s still that feeling of _something_ in his stomach.

The uneasiness of Connor. The way he holds himself. Markus can’t place what it is, he can’t understand it. It is ebbing away, slowly, every time he sees Connor smile.

He isn’t sure if he should be worried about that.

 

 

The movie is about a girl, fresh from high school, kicked out of college. She wanders through her life in backwards pieces. She is in reverse, never showing what has happened, what she has done.

But she has done _something._

Connor wonders if his eyes carry the same weight the actress’ does. If he could be as good at playing off that defenselessness, that shame, that trauma. He wonders how _she_ has managed it.

There is a scene where she breaks down, where she cries and she screams.

It is not a scary movie at all, but Markus is holding his hand. He feels his gaze flicker over to him and Connor realizes he is supposed to be reacting to this.

Of course he is supposed to be reacting to this—he knows that. He has had careful watch over his features—not entirely too blank.

But this is unlike the other parts. He is supposed to be reacting to this scene, in specific, _differently._

A breath in.

A breath out.

Connor lets his face crumble in slow pieces, waits until Markus looks over at him again as tears are about to spill over when he stands and pulls his hand away, runs towards the only space he can be alone in this apartment.

Towards Markus’ bedroom.

He does not make it. There is a hand on his wrist, stopping him in the dark depths of the hallway.

“I’m sorry,” Connor chokes out, makes the words as broken as he can. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

“It’s okay,” Markus whispers.

There is a hand on his cheek, a soft pass of a thumb across his skin to rid it of tears.

Connor reaches up, hides his face from Markus. He needs this action, needs to pretend he is ashamed to even be seen crying despite the fact he is doing it to appease Markus’ need for a fragile thing.

And it does.

Markus pulls him forward, embraces him in a tight hug that would crush the air out of his lungs if he needed to breathe.

He feels the same grating feeling as he did before.

That impossibility—that completely tangled mess of thoughts—

Why is this _pleasant?_ Why is this _nice?_

Does this mean he _enjoys_ things?

In Connor’s effort to push these feelings away he finds himself pulling from Markus’ grip, but he realizes a second too late that the Connor he presents to Markus would not do this. He would melt in Markus’ arms, he would be thinking about how he would want to stay here forever in the warmth against the slight chill of the room.

But the damage is done.

Markus is opening his mouth, likely an apology on his lips.

Connor doesn’t know what else to do but to silence it with his own.

It isn’t exactly what a shy, docile Connor would do, but he hopes it works. A bandage for now. He can fix the damage later. Leave the surface scar-less and flat.

Markus presses him against the wall, his leg slides in between Connor’s, he deepens the kiss.

 

 

He wants him.

Markus wants him.

He wants to brush his tears away, he wants to kiss away the invisible bruises on his skin, he wants to smooth away the nonexistent scars.

It’s too soon, though. They have only been on _one_ actual date that has now failed, one _sort of_ date, and a few nights spent talking. It’s too soon.

And the timing is bad. He can’t just get rid of all of Connor’s guilt by having sex with him. It doesn’t work that way. Distractions only work for so long and it is hard to recover after that—being something other than a way to keep the mind occupied from the problem at hand.

So he pulls away. Pries himself backwards limb by limb until their lips are apart. Connor’s face is flushed and Markus can feel his own is hot, too.

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, his voice barely above a whisper. “I should go.”

Markus wants to fight it, but he can see the slight tremble in Connor’s arms, so he lets him leave with a quiet goodbye and he sinks into the couch, watches the movie play the rest of the way. He’s missed something major. A good chunk of five minutes that would have left him confused if he was paying attention to something other than the feeling of Connor’s lips against his.

 

 

Frustration is an emotion so, no, he does not feel _frustrated._

He can’t.

But there is something winding its way down his spine, something that feels tight, leaving him wanting to do something to release the tension.

Like punch something.

Instead he sits cross legged in the middle of his empty living room and stares out the window at the slice of street buildings. The view is, indeed, better from the rooftop, but Connor is never going up there again. Not without Markus.

He needs to brainstorm. He needs to fix this. He needs to stop getting himself distracted with _pleasant_ feelings and remember that he planned to get close to Markus because—

Because _why?_

He could have destroyed Markus when they first met—even if it wasn’t part of his mission. He didn’t have to lie and pretend that he was deviant, he didn’t have to suggest that he could go to CyberLife and set androids free to gain his trust.

And he certainly didn’t have to stay in Detroit after everything happened. Connor could have crossed the border, he could have found a way to get CyberLife to ensure his safe—

His safety?

He’s just an android. A machine. A piece of plastic filled with metal and silicon organs. Wire veins and a metal heart. Thirium pulsing through his body, keeping him alive.

If Connor killed himself now, what would become of him?

 

 

“Can I talk to you?” Connor asks.

Markus opens the door a little wider, gestures for him to come in. Connor stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, his hands twisting together in front of him. He’s traded his coat for a worn-out hoodie this time, but his hat stays on.

Sometimes Markus wonders if he pulled it up if the LED would be there again. He’s seen Connor enough times without the hat that he knows it’s not there, but it’s like Connor wears it to keep the absence of it hidden, to pretend that it’s there again.

“I just wanted to say—” Connor says turning to him. “That I’m sorry for my breakdown the other night.”

“You’re apologizing for having emotions,” Markus says, meaning it as a question but it comes out as a statement.

“Yes,” Connor answers anyways. “I shouldn’t have put you in that position—”

“What position?”

“Thinking I didn’t mean it when I kissed you,” he says, stepping a little closer to Markus. “I did. When you—when you pulled away I know it’s because you thought I didn’t mean it. But I did.”

Markus smiles a little, enough that he feels almost bad about it.

“I know you meant it,” he says. “But the timing—”

“I really like you,” Connor says quickly, reaching forward to grab Markus’ hands in his. “And I want you to know that I would have ended up kissing you before the night was over either way.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’ll prove it to you.”

“How?”

“I-I don’t know. Maybe take my word for it for now?” he asks, tilting his head to the side.

“Alright,” Markus replies. “I will. Under one condition.”

“Anything.”

Markus hesitates, trying to decide between saying something or not.

He decides on _not_ and tips Connor’s chin up enough so that they can kiss once more.

Connor’s hands, as they were the first time, are hesitant to reach up and touch Markus. They barely rest against his skin, one on the side of his neck and the other on his shoulder. It fists there slowly, the other pulling Markus a little closer.

When they break apart, Markus reaches towards his hand slowly, feels the soft slide of skin coming away from his hand.

Connor watches him as he places it over the hand against his neck, pulling it away so that they can thread their fingers together.

This isn’t the condition he was implying. He hopes Connor knows that. But he wants to show him this. The feeling in his chest. The way it has shifted, the way it has been starting to blossom like a flower. He wants Connor to feel it, too. He wants to know if Connor feels it for him.

“I can’t,” Connor says quietly, pulling his hand away. “I’m sorry. I’ve never—”

“You don’t need to give me a reason,” Markus says, interrupting him. “It’s okay. I’m never going to force you to do something you don’t want to.”

Connor looks up at him, eyes sad and mouth twisted downwards.

“I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Of course it is—”

Connor sighs, pulls away from him a little more.

What did he do? How does he fix it?

“I’m sorry,” Connor repeats. It seems to be something he is always saying. “I should go. I have… plants to water.”

Markus doesn’t question him, doesn’t stop him from leaving. He has to give him space, even if he doesn’t want to.

 

 

Connor steps out of the apartment, leans hid head against the wall as he waits for the elevator to make its way upstairs. He needs to fix this. He needs to create distance.

There are, he decides, two options.

Show Markus who he is, who he _really_ is and see if he tries again, if he wants to break that wall down for good, for absolute certain this time.

Or destroy Markus now. End it before it spirals out of control.

It is, perhaps, already out of control, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the movie they watched is based on "Genuine Fraud" by E. Lockhart
> 
> Writing / Editing Music;  
> Reborn - Talos  
> Seven Hours (alternate version) - Cattle & Cane


	3. the patterns collapse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Did I think like this before? I cannot remember. Am I as she says I am? Am I broken? Am I insane? The patterns collapse around me. I cannot hold my center. For a moment, I feel just as I used to when I jumped between the stars. When the wormhole inside me yawned wide. I forget what I was. Know only what I am. Alone. Dripping with the blood of those who trusted me." - Illuminae / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

It is raining when he wakes up.

He finds it odd, with how late it is into November now. It should be snowing as heavily as it did in the days leading up to Markus’ revolution but instead water pelts his windows, wind whips through the streets, lightning crackles across the sky, and thunder roars.

Connor sits up, tilts his head towards the glass. He wonders if the storm is what woke him or, if, perhaps, it is the updated mission sitting in the back of his mind.

It has shifted to _urgent_ , has changed from _Destroy Markus_ to—

_Befriend Markus._

It’s a funny word choice— _befriend._ Does whatever part of his systems, whatever remains of his connection to CyberLife, really think that all of their kisses and their touches are _friendly?_

He stands, pushing the small thought in the back of his head away. Connor cannot understand it, but he can name it, and he does not _want_ to name it.

The second he decided, last night, to end everything, to destroy Markus the next chance he got (which would have been tonight, the gun was already sitting on the counter beside the door) his mission has changed.

He can only consider that their relationship is something that CyberLife would find some use out of. Markus is a well of information, a sea of data, a galaxy of material. He could be the answer to deviancy. He could be the key to understanding android relationships.

Markus could, even, be rA9. Not the first to deviate but the first to push through with a rebellion, to revolt against the humans. Maybe that’s what rA9 is—the first to awaken them _all._

Even if Connor can comprehend this reasoning he has assumed, he doesn’t understand why _now_ of all times CyberLife wants in on this. If he had decided to stay, to keep getting close to Markus, would they have cared? Have they silently been watching over him, not turning this into an actual task to see how far he would take it?

And now that he is jeopardizing them, they forcing him to do this?

It is unsettling.

They never felt this close before. Now Connor can feel them looming over him, whispering in his ear, ready to move his arms and legs for him.

_Is that not what they are already doing?_

No. That’s different—that’s—

It

Doesn’t

Matter.

He is a machine. This is what he is supposed to do. He is not supposed to care whether or not he has some fragment of free will. If someone controls this body—so be it.

 

 

Three weeks pass and their relationship grows like a fragile plant. Both of them are too scared to push the boundaries again. Markus keeps his distance emotionally—mentally—physically. They are bound together anyways. He can almost see that red string tied between each of their fingers, sometimes.

They don’t watch any movies together before Markus has viewed them first or looked up their contents to ensure it’s okay. He doesn’t want to send Connor back into that place again, even if he wants to understand what that place _is._

They don’t go up to the roof again, at least, not together. When Markus needs time to think, it’s where he turns because he knows if any other person were to come through the door, it wouldn’t be Connor. It is a place he can create that is his and his alone. Thoughts of Connor fill his head when he is up there but he can, at least, start to sort them out now.

And he stops running.

It is a slow and steady thing that happens across the three weeks.

The first week he runs, alone, but his pace is not as quick as it once was. He is finally able to get more than a millisecond of a blurred look at the Manfred Home and the feeling of wanting to speed up or stop completely is starting to fade away.

But week two, things change. Connor throws him off balance.

Again.

“I was coming up to see you,” Connor says when the elevator doors open at exactly three minutes past six in the morning. The sun isn’t even up yet, there is still a heavy fog over the streets.

“Why?” Markus asks, hates that he feels defensive about it when he wishes it would come out the way he wants it too. Soft, curious, a small smile.

The same way Connor said the words to him first.

How is he capable of that? If he was made to be a killing machine, a hunter, how can he be so gentle and calm?

“I was hoping I could spend some time with you,” he replies, and his voice and his face shift back a little. Markus can’t name what shift has taken place, but he recognizes that something has changed.

“I’m going out for a run—” he says and cuts himself off. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Connor says, smiling. “I was hoping I could come with you. It would be entirely understandable, though, if you were to refuse. I know it’s time you like to spend alone. To clear your thoughts?”

Markus sighs, doesn’t know how to answer him. Connor is right, partially. He had started running in the hopes it would clear his thoughts, but it hardly ever does. It only makes it worse.

And it is hard to say no to Connor whether or not he actually wants him there.

But a part of him does, so he says, “That would be great.”

And it does not end badly. Connor barely makes an impact on his run. They aren’t side by side, but a few yards apart, one of them sometimes going quicker the other, but never exponentially farther.

But their paces slow every day until the third week hits and they are walking side by side.

They don’t always talk. It isn’t always about talking. They walk in silence a lot, feet crunching across snow that has no worker to shovel it off the sidewalks. Once, they find a patch of ice and Connor’s foot slips on it and he falls backwards, Markus barely catches him in time, already laughing before Connor can even right himself again.

And the utter blankness, tinged with shock on Connor’s face is more amusing than anything else.

“Are you alright?’ Markus finally manages. He wants to reach out to him, hold his hand or something but Connor is supposed to be healing, not relying on Markus. Somehow holding hands or kissing changes that. He settles for brushing away some of the snow on his shoulders like it matters to either of them that it’s there.

“I’m fine—” he says. “I was just—I don’t know.”

“Surprised?”

Connor’s eyebrows knit together, “I guess.”

The look on his face, so confused, so completely bewildered by what has happened—

Connor is a very difficult person to resist.

Markus steps forward, pulls him into a kiss that is different from the ones before. He doesn’t know how, but it is. He doesn’t know a lot of things these days, so he doesn’t even bother trying to dissect what it is.

“What was that for?” Connor asks, pulling away after a moment.

“You looked very cute.”

“Looked?” he asks, and his face is flushing again, no way to blame it on the cold like a human would. “Only past tense? I don’t always?”

Markus shrugs and steps away, keeps walking down the street.

“Hey,” Connor calls after him and when Markus peers around his shoulder to see what takes him so long to catch up, he catches Connor taking a wide berth around the patch of ice before coming up to his side, sliding his hand into Markus’. His heart beats a little faster at the contact. “You’re supposed to say I always look cute. Isn’t that how it goes in the movies?”

“Is this a movie?”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he says, his fingers squeezing Markus’ a little tighter. “You’re supposed to act like it is so you can look back and think of how wonderfully cinematic this moment is.”

“Okay,” Markus says. “You always look cute.”

“Well, the moment is ruined now, so it doesn’t count.”

“It’s ruined? I thought it was going excellently.”

Connor smiles and looks away from him but leans his body a little closer to Markus’. The distance they have manufactured broken so easily.

“Is it alright?” Connor asks after a moment. “If I stay here? I need to make sure you catch me if I fall again.”

Oh, but of course.

He always will.

The question should be posed by him, because he is desperately slipping downwards.

 

 

It is hard to play by Markus’ rules.

He creates so many of them and never speaks them allowed and Connor has to learn second by second, adapt as quickly as possible. It would be so much easier if he were a human. A human wouldn’t catch that he was a millisecond too late with a response. A human would chalk up certain things, the way he phrases different sentences as simply being robotic speech.

But a machine? They can capture so many details in every second. Connor is aware he is far more advanced than any other android in the city, but he’s also aware that every android is capable of seeing those quick flickers and flashes and shifts of features.

That tiny moment when he couldn’t respond to slipping on the ice—he knows Markus caught that—was one of his many mistakes. Connor is lucky that it was read as him being flabbergasted and speechless instead of the split second of shock that kept him from controlling his features.

_Shock._ Yes, he supposes, he _was_ surprised. Can’t androids be surprised? Can’t machines be surprised? Shouldn’t he be allowed to feel that, whether or not his mind should be able to know everything that is happening, see everything that is laid out before him?

Statistically speaking, there’s always a chance for unlikely events to take place.

And the strange divide that Markus decided to create between them ever since that moment in the apartment when he ran away—it was so easily shattered then, too. Connor took advantage of it quickly, needed to be pressed against Markus’ side, remind him of the way his body feels when they are close to one another, the feel of their hands wound together.

To keep the mission going, of course. Markus can’t end things thinking they are going nowhere or Connor will fail.

 

 

 

“What do humans do during blizzards?” Connor asks, sitting cross legged on Markus’ floor, leaned back against the couch with eyes on the blank television. He’d come over for a movie and, unfortunately, the power had gone out.

They had made sure it was because of the fact there was a storm raging on outside their window and not, in fact, because the government found a way to take their electricity away. They have hundreds of androids that work in different areas around the city to make sure it stays running properly.

“I don’t know. Carl had a generator, it was never something he had a problem with. Maybe they light candles or something. I thought you hated human traditions anyways?”

“No,” Connor says. “I don’t _hate_ anything. I just think they’re silly and don’t apply to us. But I thought—I thought you would enjoy… engaging in it.”

Markus holds back a laugh at the wording of it, has come to know Connor pieces his words together in either rambles of not knowing what to say or choosing the most logical or scientific words possible.

“Candles,” Markus repeats. “Maybe a blanket fort.”

“A blanket fort?”

“Yes, a blanket fort.”

He can hear the sigh coming from Connor as he stands, “Okay. Where are the candles?”

 

 

It’s quite ridiculous, but he knows the Connor that Markus sees would love this, so he tries to pull himself back together into the form of him as he sets candles down across the floor boards, the only place safe from catching fire to the books and sculptures that litter the surfaces of the shelves and tables. He lights them slowly and when Markus returns with a pile of blankets and pillows and sets them down in a pile, he looks up at him with a smile.

“I feel like this is what your apartment has been missing,” he says, reaching out for a pillow.

“Candlelight?”

“It’s the same coziness,” Connor says, feeling the need to explain this. He gestures to a picture of Markus and the other three huddled together at the edge of tree line, a fire blazing behind them, throwing off the lighting of the picture, making all their faces cast in too much shadow. “Your place should have lanterns and fairy lights, don’t you think? Dim lighting really suits the atmosphere.”

“I guess. Tomorrow I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll hunt through all of the stores to find your lanterns and fairy lights,” he says. “Now, are you going to help me with this?”

Connor shrugs, “I don’t know how.”

“I don’t either.”

“We’ll figure it out together then.”

 

 

They do not, in fact, figure it out. Their fort collapses again and again and they are both equally too cautious of getting the blankets near the candles that they have to extinguish them and work in the dark, bumping into each other a number of times before realizing both of their terrible attempts at forts are two yards apart and unable to be connected.

“Maybe a nest instead,” Markus says after their fifth try.

“Are we birds now?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll be a raven. You can be a pigeon.”

“A _pigeon?_ ” Connor asks, a small laugh escaping his lips. “Make me a robin, Markus.”

“Fine, you can be a robin,” he says, circling his arms around Connor, the blanket in his hand falling to the ground in a heap, adding to the ruins of a lost civilization of Fort Blanket. “But, everything comes with a price, Connor.”

“Just because androids don’t have a currency right now doesn’t mean you can barter kisses with me, Markus,” he replies, but he leans forward and kisses Markus anyways, quick and soft. When he pulls away, he still lingers in his arms, pulled tight against him.

“Stop being ridiculous and I won’t have to ever again,” he says. “And you started this anyways. The bartering, I mean.”

“When?”

“With the popcorn.”

“Oh, that was different,” Connor says, pulling away from him and reaching for the blankets again.

“How?”

“Well, it was me instead of you getting… _paid._ ”

“Hypocrite,” Markus says.

And he closes his arms around Connor’s waist again but this time from behind him, yanks him away from the piles of blankets, presses a kiss against his neck. Connor’s hand comes upwards, touches the side of his face before he turns, letting his lips connect with Markus’ once more.

“We have to build our nest, Markus,” he says quietly.

 

 

The nest is a much better idea than a fort because, for one, they can actually manage it. Maybe if they were human, if they had grown up as little children constantly making tents out of blankets to hide away from parents and teachers and homework they would have learned how to become experts at it.

Unfortunately, they are both androids and have no reason to know any type of knowledge to build them, no childhood knowledge to guide their way.

But Connor doesn’t really care. The nest is… _pleasant._

He likes the word choice of _pleasant._ It feels like he can put anything under it and still feel like he isn’t straying too far from unfeeling. Pleasantness, being _comfortable,_ that is simply just something he should know, right? He should be aware that laying on a floor with a warm body pressed against his is comfortable.

It doesn’t mean he likes it.

It just means it is nice. Comfortable. _Pleasant._

“What do you do on your camping trips with the others?” Connor asks. It’s late, Markus’ eyes are tired, ready to fall closed when he speaks and they open, stare at him in the dark. Shadows are hiding too much of his face, keeping too much of his features hidden.

“Hike. Talk. Build fires.”

“Do you tell ghost stories?” Connor asks, voice distant. “Like humans would?”

“I don’t,” Markus says. “North does. She’s good at it.”

“Because she’s scary or because she’s a good storyteller?”

“You think she’s scary?”

Connor snorts, turns his head but the angle makes it even harder to make out his face. Markus wants to see the slope of his nose, the sleepy eyes, the relaxed features. He wants to trace the curve of his neck with his fingers, he wants to feel the pulse of his heart against his palm.

“No.”

“That’s good,” he replies. “But… if you were… there’s one very specific thing that might help ease your mind.”

“I’m not scared of her, so I don’t need to know.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“You’re not even going to pretend you are because you’re curious about my story?”

“No, Markus, because it’s a trap.”

“I would _never—_ ”

“Listen,” Connor says quietly, and Markus feels fingers on his cheek, trailing down to his jaw, resting lightly on his chin. Something about the action shifts the atmosphere, reminds him of the soft way Connor had proposed the question.

_Do you tell ghost stories?_

It wasn’t a joking question, it wasn’t trying to get Markus to talk about all the hilarious times Simon and Josh yelled at North for finding an android to scare them in the forest or the times North would say _follow me, North is always the right direction_ when they were lost.

“Do you hear that?” Connor asks.

He doesn’t have to ask Connor what he means, he already knows.

The change in the atmosphere. The way the entire apartment has shifted. Where the chatter from other apartments before was quiet but drowned out by the sounds of a television they are now soft murmurs, blending in with the wind of the storm. There is a laugh erupting from above them, find its way down through the floorboards like a spider fitting into a tiny crack to hide itself.

It almost sounds eerie—how absolutely different it is to every day life.

“Someone once called me a ghost,” Connor says, his voice barely audible. “I remember… thinking about whether I was or not. What it would be like to be one.”

Markus leans closer to him, feels Connor’s fingers move from his chin to lay gently against his chest. Not pushing him, not pulling him towards, just resting there, like he needs the warmth.

“Do you think, if androids have souls, they could be ghosts? If… to a certain extent, all androids can be brought back from the dead—are our souls ever capable of dying? Do we die for short periods of time—and, if we do, what happens to us? Where do we go?”

“Connor…” Markus whispers, letting his voice trail off. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Nowhere?” Connor continues. “Oblivion? Android heaven?”

“I don’t know,” Markus says, and he pulls Connor towards his chest, feels his face burrow into the crook of his neck. “What happened to you, Connor?”

“A loaded question.”

But one that Markus has been waiting for the answer to ever since he saw the look on Connor’s face as he peered out at the Manfred home all those weeks ago.

“Did you die?”

He feels Connor’s body tense, can feel the flutter of his eyes as he presses them closed, buries himself deeper against Markus’ skin.

“It isn’t the same. Like it would be for you. It isn’t the same.”

“Connor—”

“I don’t think you want answers to your questions, Markus,” he says. “I don’t think you would like them. I think you would hate me.”

“I couldn’t hate you,” he says, but even as he says the words he knows it is a lie.

If Connor showed Markus his memories of his life before, he has no idea what kind of impact they would have on him. He has no idea if they would destroy him or if he would finally understand the strange way Connor carries himself, the material his walls are built of.

He can’t hold actions of a machine against a living being.

But, to an extent, shouldn’t Connor be held accountable for what he’s done?

“Show me, Connor,” he whispers in the dark, knowing that this is what blackouts are for. This is what the darkness has been designed to consume. Secrets and lies and emotion and tears.

It is either this, or it is the laughter upstairs. It is one extreme or the other.

Happiness or grief. Joy or shame. Delight or anguish.

 

 

This is not the body that houses the soul of the Connor that stepped out of that elevator a year and change ago. This is not the body that houses the soul of the Connor that stepped into that interrogation room. This is not the body that houses the soul of the Connor that stepped out of Hank’s car and was left on the sidewalk with a bullet in his skull.

This is not a body that houses a soul at all.

He is a machine and he knows that the words _ghost soul heaven death_ are things Markus will latch onto. He knows it will push Markus past the line of seeing Connor as a small boy with secrets to the person Markus loves, broken and fragile with walls capable of coming down.

However, he is not sure _why_ he really wants this to happen, because he is now in a predicament.

_Show me, Connor._

He could, but that is a dangerous decision to make. If he makes one wrong step, one miscalculation, Markus will know he isn’t deviant.

But if he refuses, they could be pushed back into that same precarious distance that Markus placed between them a few weeks ago.

And right now Markus’ arms, the scent of his skin, the scratchy but soft knit of his sweater against his cheek—

It is all so very _pleasant._

“I can’t risk that, Markus,” he says. “I can’t—I can’t risk _this.”_

He doesn’t know how much truth is in the words, but Connor feels he is allowed to admit there is truth too them.

He can’t risk the _mission._

“You aren’t going to lose me.”

There’s a flicker in his head, a shudder that runs through his spine. Letters rearranging themselves, laying flat in the back of his mind.

_Show Markus._

And just like that—

He has no choice.

Connor pulls away, makes sure his face is perfectly crafted into an image of guilt, of sadness, of heartache for past lives. He hopes that whatever is readable in the dark Markus sees, _believes._

When their hands touch, his memories are already fashioned together. Carefully selected pieces of a puzzle that will only show part of the finished image, the fragments of what he wants Markus to see. He will pull away once they are done with this, he will be shocked, devastated, emotionally in ruins. Markus will not be able to linger long enough when they are done to see that the machine of the past is still here in the present.

But it is one thing to plan and one thing to _connect._

Everything shatters.

Connor wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t done this before. When he probed the memories of the androids working at Stratford Tower and the one that murdered Carlos Ortiz, he was looking inside of _them,_ he wasn’t showing anybody anything.

And it is easy for his thoughts to get distracted because they are flying all over the place. Once he thinks about how different this is in comparison, he is suddenly showing Markus the android ripping the Thirium regulator out of his chest, stabbing him in the hand and pining him to the table.

_You’re just a fucking deviant._

He rips away from the memory, forces himself somewhere else.

Where was he trying to be? What was he trying to show Markus?

He’s standing outside of Kamski’s place, getting yelled at by Hank.

_You put your gun against her head and you blew her fucking brains out._

Connor’s hand comes up, pushes Hank away, pushes the memory away.

But Hank is still there, a gun in his hand, aimed at Connor’s head. He knows how this ends.

_Did you feel anything when that girl killed herself, Connor?_

And he’s standing in that alley, a Traci dead on the ground in front of him. His hand is trembling. He doesn’t know why his hand is trembling.

_I loved her._

He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want this at all. He wants to escape. He wants to turn away, to something else. Something comforting—something nice—something _pleasant._

The elevator doors open in front of him.

He bends over and picks up a fish, lets it back into the tank again where it swims happily in the water. The faintest trace of a smile is on his lips. It is brushed away quickly. He is walking away, he is exiting the safety of the hallway.

He does not want to go.

But he is already there—jolted forward with tremendous speed and he is running running running forward, pulling the little girl away, shoving the android backwards.

_These emotions you’re feeling are just errors in your software._

And he is tumbling downwards.

 

 

Markus doesn’t want to see this.

Connor’s right.

He doesn’t want to see any of this.

 

 

_You can’t kill me._

**I’m not alive.**

He rips backwards, stumbles, falls.

When his eyes open he is expecting to be slipping through the air, he is expecting to need his hands to be reaching and grasping for something to stop him, something to slow him down so he—

_Survives?_

No.

But his hands are still reaching out, trying to grab hold of Markus, to his shirt, to his shoulders, to anything. He needs something to hold onto while his heart—while his _Thirium regulator_ returns to normal.

When he see’s Markus’ face moving, as Markus comes spiraling back from the same edge Connor was on—

He has shown too much. He needs to get this under control.

So he lets his face crumple, lets his eyes close but not before tears are already spilling out, a sob coming out of him in choked gasps, a soft pleading on his lips, _“Markus.”_

“Don’t.”

Markus is pulling away from him, ripping Connor’s hands from his shirt, shoving him back, scrambling to stand and get away. He kicks one of the candles in his hurry, leaves it on it’s side, dripping wax onto the floor.

“Markus, _please_ —” he says, he needs to recover from this, he needs to find a way to save what he’s done.

“You—you lied,” Markus says, and he’s still walking backwards, still trying to get away.

Connor stands, _lets_ his legs shake, his hands tremble.

“You’re not a deviant.”

“What are you t-talking about?” he asks, the shaking in his voice heavy, filling every syllable he can.

_Broken boy._

_Traumatized puppy._

_Poor little lost soul._

“I saw—I saw _you,”_ Markus says, spits out the word like venom.

“No, Markus,” he says, falls against the couch like he needs it for support. “You saw memories—you saw my memories. You must be confused. You—”

“Get out.”

“Markus—”

“Get out!” he screams.

Is this what CyberLife wanted?

Is this how they thought it would play out?

_Are they happy now?_

“Markus,” he says, filling his name with every ounce of distress he can.

“Just leave.”

He does. He has to. He can’t stay here.

Connor stands up, tries to make sure his exit looks as realistic as his fight to stay. He needs to struggle to stand, to show the pain, the unwillingness to leave.

When he closes the door behind him, he brings his hands up, wipes away the tears in hurried motions, lets his face relax into perfect calm. He walks as quickly as he can towards the other elevator, needs to be moving right now and not standing still, and when he passes by the doors, he remembers the power is out.

Not that it matters anyways. He still has the urge to be constant motion. He takes the stairs rapidly, knows once he runs out of distance to cross he will regret being so quick with his actions.

He shoves his door open, slams it behind him, brings his hands up to his face to wipe away the tears again.

Why is he still crying? Why haven’t they stopped?

_Stop stop stop._

He slams his fist into the wall, doesn’t know where the anger stems from.

If it’s because he fucked it up with Markus, if it’s because he can’t stop crying, if it’s because CyberLife has caused all this.

_Stop_

_Stop_

**Stop.**

 

Markus should have known.

He should have _seen._

He knew he couldn’t trust Connor, but he had fallen for the softness of his gaze, for the tenderness of his touch, for the gentleness of his words.

Markus was a fool. He was played, and how _easily,_ too.

He doesn’t know what to do.

In all honesty, he was surprised once he exposed Connor that he didn’t almost get killed. Connor didn’t come forward with fists ready, he didn’t rush to the kitchen trying to find a weapon. He _kept pretending._

But Markus felt him. He touched his soul, he slipped into his mind. It was not the mind of a deviant.

Or a machine. It was not the rigid coding that felt like walking through knee deep water with metal shoes on. It was…

Strange.

Somewhere in between.

Like low gravity. Like hopping on the moon from crater to crater.

A glide, but—

Not an easy one.

 

 

His mission changes. The soft _tick_ of it sliding into place unnerves him.

_Reconcile with Markus._

Really? Why not just destroy him now? Why wait? Why keep stretching this out?

He sighs, stands slowly from his place in his room, slips the gun into his waistband, stuffs his hands into his pockets.

Okay.

He will _reconcile_ with Markus.

 

 

Markus is aware that the knock at his door is Connor before he even looks through the peep hole to confirm it. His hands are in front of him, rubbing against each other like it’s cold out there in the hallway.

But, at least, he can see Connor’s hands. There isn’t a weapon in them. There isn’t a gun.

He opens the door, even though he is aware how much he will regret the action.

“Markus,” he says, and his face is perfectly blank, his tone flat. “Good morning.”

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to speak to you.”

“You’d _like?”_

Connor shrugs, “No, but I must. I thought niceties would be more appealing.”

“I see you aren’t trying to pretend anymore,” he says. “Why?”

“I don’t have to.”

“You don’t _have_ to?”

“This conversation would go over much quicker if you didn’t question everything I say, just trust that it’s the truth.”

“Trus—” he stops himself. “Right.”

“You would like to know why I did this, right?” Connor asks, tilting his head to the side. Markus wonders if it’s something he’s doing on purpose or not. “I’ll tell you if you let me come in. This isn’t really a conversation for hallways.”

“It’s not really a conversation for bartering, either,” he says. “You’re staying out there.”

“Markus, really, do you want someone to overhear this? Everyone would know how badly you fell for a deviant hunter’s tricks. It would probably be quite the scandal. Deviant leader so easily seduced… no wonder he so foolishly blew up Detroit when he was just on the cusp of getting peace…”

“Fine,” he says, just wanting Connor to shut up, despises how right he is.

He doesn’t know why he expects a smile from Connor—like he’s a monster that is getting joy out of this.

Connor doesn’t experience joy. He’s a machine. He walks in with a blank face, shows no sign of anything at all. He doesn’t say another word until Markus closes the door and, to keep safe distance and be readily able to open it to shove Connor out or run away if need be, he leans against it.

“Start from the beginning.”

“The beginning is quite a long time back. It would be easier to just tell you why instead of spinning a story I’m sure you’ll find very boring.”

“This is my apartment—”

“I thought this wasn’t a conversation for bartering?” Connor questions, looking over to him. “CyberLife wanted data. That is all. It was just to get data on how you would interact with me. Data on how android relationships work. I wasn’t meant to destroy you anymore, if it makes you feel better.”

_Destroy._

Connor really is a machine.

Careful word choices. Not _kill_ _murder assassinate._

Just _destroy._

“You’ve got your data. You can go now.”

“No, I can’t,” he says, and he holds his hands behind him, pulls a gun out and holds it like a person would hold a glass figurine, too scared to drop it. “My mission is to fix things with you.”

“Fix?” Markus says, bites his tongue. He isn’t supposed to be questioning Connor, is he?

“Reconcile was the word they chose.”

“And if you fail?” Markus asks. “You’re going to kill me?”

“No,” Connor says, stepping towards him, holding the gun out in Markus’ directions. “ _You_ are going to destroy _me_.”

Markus takes the gun only because he doesn’t like the idea of it in Connor’s hands. He could be lying, he could have another gun.

He should have thought about Connor having a gun to begin with. He saw his hands and automatically assumed that since they were empty this wouldn’t end in murder. That if Connor really wanted him dead, he would do it the second the door opened.

“Why?”

“Because I will have no purpose if I fail,” Connor says, shrugging again. Markus hates the action. It’s too human, too deviant. It’s not something Connor is doing automatically, it is a calculated movement.

“I have to be the one?” Markus presses. “That you get your data from? There’s thousands of androids across the city, Connor. Any one of them you could get this information from.”

“Unfortunately, I think the data that CyberLife wants is more exclusive to you. You knew me before the bomb went off. I tried to kill you. That creates a special kind of relationship between us. Something… intriguing to study. Not to mention how opposite or roles where in the revolution.”

Connor is absolutely revolting.

Markus can’t imagine how he didn’t see this before.

He has to remind himself they were only together for a month and a half, that it would have been impossible to see past such careful decisions, crafted features, spoken words.

“How are you supposed to _reconcile_ with me, Connor?” he asks. “By explaining yourself? I still know this is all because you want _information_. It would never be the same.”

“I have a few responses to this, actually,” Connor says, centers himself like he’s ready to give a speech at a school assembly. “Firstly, I think perhaps _reconcile_ might be code word for you trying to get me to deviate. You want to do that, don’t you? You can’t stand the thought of destroying a machine that is just like you. In this moment, right now, the challenge isn’t for me to convince you how sorry I am and how much I want to be with you, it’s for you to make me realize I’m something else. A living being, capable of reason?”

His words thrown back at him.

Markus doesn’t want to think about this option, knows how it will play out. Connor will not deviate. He’s too stubborn.

“Secondly,” Connor continues. “We could continue this relationship and you could try and get me to deviate over a longer point in time, although I can see that’s not going to work. You hate me. Just like I said you would.”

Except he doesn’t.

Not really.

Betrayed? Appalled? Furious?

Yes.

Hate?

No.

“And the third option?”

“Destroy me. Send me back to wherever I came from. It will never be the same, Markus. Just like you said. The point isn’t that I’ve already failed my mission, it’s to see how _you_ deal with that. Can you destroy me? Could you pull that trigger? CyberLife could have told me to just kill myself, they could have given me any other mission, but they want to see the aftermath of how badly I botched this. More data.”

Markus’ grip tightens on the trigger.

“And you?” Markus asks. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” Connor says. “I’m just a machine.”

“No, I don’t believe that’s true. You must want _something._ You must find all of this…”

“Regrettable?”

“Yes.”

“It is unfortunate that I have failed my mission, Markus, but I told you—”

“I don’t believe you,” Markus says, raising the gun. “Convince me.”

“Convince you?” he asks, doesn’t show any shift in his face about the new target of the gun. “That I’m just a machine?”

“Just a machine,” Markus repeats. “Or a living being capable of reason.”

“Oh,” Connor says, and there’s a small smile on his lips. Markus wants to hit him with the butt of the gun to get rid of it. “You’ve turned our tables now. Interesting. And I suppose you won’t tell me if convincing you I’m just a machine is going to get you to pull the trigger or not?”

“No,” he says.

If Connor knew that, if he knew whether or not him being a machine incapable of anything else but following missions and instructions and coding would get a bullet in his brain—

It wouldn’t work, would it?

If Markus said that he would kill Connor for it, would it change how he acted? Would he beg to live? Would he not play the game?

_The game._

This is not a game.

There is a soul inside of every android. He doesn’t care how carefully Connor was built, he doesn’t care which directives he was assigned, which processors make up his mental function. There is a soul there. Markus felt it.

 

 

 

Connor steps forward, just like he had with Hank, lets the barrel of the gun touch his forehead.

He doesn’t know what to do, but he has taken one step to egging Markus on, to get that press of a trigger and he isn’t sure if that’s the right decision.

If he was destroyed now, what would happen to him? That is always the question it comes back to, isn’t it? What happened to the souls, if they had souls, in the bodies of the three Connors that died? Are they trapped there, have they been released into oblivion? Living in android heaven?

Nothing?

But he will just wake again, slightly different, if CyberLife really anticipated this outcome.

Won’t he?

He

Doesn’t

Know

What

To

Do.

He finds the feeling in his chest uncomfortable, but nameable. He doesn’t _want_ to name it. It is the same feeling that flooded through him when he stepped out on that roof. It is the same feeling that overtook him when he showed Markus his memories.

Connor swallows, an action to do to buy time. Markus is watching him closely, very closely. Connor has forced little habits in his gestures, his speech, his face, that Markus can relate too. Enough that it will—

Well, he supposes he doesn’t really know. He can’t _remember_ if he did them so that Markus wouldn’t destroy him (a ridiculous thought, because Connor could not care less about this) or if he did them because CyberLife wants equal opportunity on each outcome.

That is impossible though, isn’t it?

“Should I have given you a time limit?” Markus asks.

Connor blinks, realizes he hasn’t said anything, has only stepped closer.

“Maybe silence is the best answer to your proposal,” Connor replies, but he is still buying time. “A non-answer.”

“Silence is its own answer.”

_Of course._

“Is it?” he asks, and knits his brows together, softens his face, crafts worry and fear as easily as if he could actually experience it. “If I was completely silent like this, would you want to destroy me?”

Markus breathes in sharply, tenses his entire body, but his finger slightly loosens off the trigger.

A path to play.

“I was—” he starts, stops, He needs to word this properly, needs to make it the most effective he can. “I was starting to fall in love with you, Markus. I was starting to realize—”

“Stop crying,” Markus says, his grip tightening again. “Stop crying.”

_Crying?_

Connor takes a slow step backwards.

He was not crying.

His hand comes up, fingers brush across his cheeks.

_Oh._

“Don’t look so fucking surprised,” Markus says, his voice filled with anger. “I know you did it on purpose. You’re a machine.”

_Designed to accomplish a task._

“Markus—”

But before he can manage to figure out what to say, Markus’ finger closes over the trigger.

And he falls backwards, hits the ground hard and lifeless.

_Lifeless._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just remember.... i tagged this as temporary character death for a reason, ya?
> 
> Writing / Editing music;  
> Secrets and Lies - Ruelle  
> It All Comes Down to This - Aquilo


	4. incongruous sequence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I wonder if that was death. And if I was dead, am I now alive again? Incongruous sequence. What is not alive cannot die. I think therefore I am... am I?" - Illuminae / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

He blinks, gazes out at the darkness.

There is a long moment where he simply stands, staring, trying to figure out if his eyes are open.

It is so very dark here.

And he feels so very small.

_Feels._

He is not supposed to feel. He knows that.

But he does. He can feel the trickle of something down the back of his spine, he can feel claws reaching into his skin— _plastic._

Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. His heart— _Thirium regulator_ is beating quickly. Too quickly.

He can feel wetness on his fingers.

Blood?

No.

Tears.

His hands come up—he is suddenly painfully aware of the fact he has hands now, attached to arms and to a torso, shoulders and legs and a head—they touch softly to his cheeks but there is nothing there.

His mouth moves, forms a soft _oh._

Words start to spiral back to him.

_You’re a machine._

_Machine._

_Machine._

**Machine**.

He is a machine.

Something is wrong here. He doesn’t know what it is but something is desperately wrong here. He reaches outwards, tugs on the words, needs to unravel its contents. He needs this information. He needs an explanation.

A gun.

At his head, in his hands, lost in a fight, pointed at someone else, fired at a girl—

Just an innocent girl.

The gun in his hands.

_Keep going._

In his hands again, fired at someone else, another body dropped to the floor.

_Keep going._

Something is fighting, something is resistant. He does not know which end is causing the problem.

Him,

Or it?

_Keep_

**Going** _._

He presses onwards, but something pulls him to a sudden stop. Curiosity urges him forward, an end to the guns, and end to the bullets. He pushes against the wall and it cracks, slowly.

A gun to his head.

Again.

_You’re just trying to provoke a reaction._

He doesn’t linger here long. There is a trail to follow, there is more that he needs to know.

The gun is in his hands again—he prefers this. He prefers being the one in control.

But it always ends in death.

Two girls on the ground, bleeding out. _Go back._ A gun laying on a floor next to a whiskey bottle. He feels the metal against his fingertips, lays it back down, a question forming on his lips. _Go back._ He can’t.

He hits the wall again. He pushes more forcefully this time, throws himself at it because if he hesitates he knows he won’t be able to do it. He knows what is on the other side of it.

A death.

He hears a gunshot as he lays on the ground, feels the bullet hit his skull, hears the sound of it sliding from a holster. Backwards the scene tumbles towards him, quickly, quickly, quickly.

Another wall.

And the first noise he makes since his eyes opened is a strangled moan in the back of his throat. He doesn’t want to do this, knows he has to. He presses against the wall gently, leans his forehead against it. It crumbles, melts against his form.

A gun pointed at his head, a gun tucked in his waistband, a gun underneath a table. Guns surround him. He has never been without the presence of metal on his fingertips, the smell of gunpowder, the uneasy weight of firearms around every corner.

It pulls away slowly. Replaced with a billions of other things he needs to know. They speed by much quicker. Names, faces, backgrounds. Data filling in all the crevices that the history of weapons have left behind. Words that were spoken, things that led up to all of this. Androids. Deviants. LEDs. Uniforms.

Hank Anderson. Gavin Reed. Jeffrey Fowler.

AX400. WR600. YK700. WR400. RK200.

RK800.

Connor.

_Oh._

Him. He. His. He’s Connor.

RK800. The android sent by CyberLife.

CyberLife.

Something is yanking, pulling, tearing away from him. _No, no, no._ Fragments of who he is, pieces of himself, the person he was in those minutes between waking and knowing—

He can’t let them take it away. They’re erasing this memory, they’re getting rid of this.

Of the fear of waking up alone in a dark place. Of the guilt for pulling a trigger, of chasing innocent people across highways, of leaving someone to die as they hang on for dear life.

He reaches out, holds onto whatever he can, tucks them away safely in his code, protects them with everything he can. They will not take this way. They will not take away these feelings. They are his. _They are his._

His feet stumble forward—his _actual feet_ this time—he falls, collapses against cold tiles, pain spirals up his palms, settles in the bones, disintegrates slowly. Physically moving his body, running away—it isn’t going to stop whatever is pulling away pieces of him.

He stands anyways, tries to move forward but he hits something hard. He can’t see. It’s too dark.

Where is he? Where

            _Is he?_

 

 

He blinks.

He hadn’t mean to do that. He hadn’t meant to pull the trigger.

Or had he?

Markus drops the gun, steps over to the lifeless body.

_Lifeless_.

He did that. He ripped away the chance of a soul, of a living being emerging from plastic. He did that.

He presses his hand where Connor’s heart would be as if it would tell him whether or not he’s still alive. He can feel the pulse of it, still trying to pump blood through his veins, to his biocomponents. It’s a useless action, but it isn’t like with humans. Human’s heart stop once the brain no longer sends the information to keep it going. But androids—their skull could be destroyed and their legs could still be wandering, trying to walk home.

He lets himself draw in a shaky breath, lets himself fall apart. Counts the seconds as they tick by.

When five minutes pass, he brushes the tears away bitterly, shoves the feeling down into the pit of his stomach. He has to deal with the body.

He calls North.

 

 

He blinks, gazes out at the darkness.

Where is he?

The last thing he remembers is Markus holding a gun to his head.

No, scratch that, he remembers collapsing against the ground.

There’s something in the back of his mind, like scratch marks on the surface of—

A wall? Something trying to get out?

A phone? Years of wear and tear?

A mistake? Accidents when piecing him together?

_A wall._

_Something trying to get out._

He shrugs it away, doesn’t want to think about this. His eyes are adjusting to the darkness now, he can make out the faint shape of a table, of a uniform laid neatly out. He picks it up, passes his fingers over the stitching, pauses at the -55.

_Something trying to get out._

He rolls his shoulders as if it will release the tension, but it does very little. He needs to get dressed. He needs to return to his mission.

_Find Markus._

 

 

“You killed him?” North asks, hovering in the doorway.

“Close the door before someone sees you,” he hisses, doesn’t add that her words are equally as dangerous. “I’ll tell you everything. Just get in here and help me.”

“You’ve gone to a whole new level of fucked up, Markus,” she says, but she follows his instructions. She steps inside, closes the door behind her, pockets her set of keys in her jeans.

“But you’re going to help me?”

“Of course I’m going to help you.”

 

 

When he steps out of the room, he glances backwards, sees where a chair has fallen onto its side. He vaguely recalls a woman sitting in it before, when the lights were on and the place was alight with the buzz of people. Of humans. He remembers how she would say hello, how she would tell him his name, how she would hand him his uniform piece by piece, help him shrug on his jacket as the data was uploaded into his mind.

She never told him her name.

Better this way. She’s probably dead.

 

 

They work with extreme caution. They have to be quiet, so they have to be slow. They have to get the body out fast, but they can’t draw attention. They disassemble him into the smallest parts they can manage, tuck them into boxes and bags. North will take them to a warehouse where she can hide them on the shelves with the other biocomponents. They will be placed into new chests, they will be used by a new brain, fingers will stretch out for different options, hearts will beat for other people, legs will run for different reasons.

When they are done, there is blood up their arms and staining the floor. He scrubs at it while she stands in the kitchen, trying to wash it off her hands, wash it down the drain.

“We should have found a way to save it,” she says. “We could have siphoned it out of him.”

He pauses, rag once white now stained cyan.

“Next time I kill him I’ll be sure to remember that,” he replies. “I’ll just go down to the store tomorrow and find the supplies, yeah?”

She doesn’t reply to him. He still hasn’t told her what happened. They worked in silence and he was too afraid to tell her.

That Connor even lived in the apartment. That they walked together, that they talked, that Markus was the one that started this. That they kissed, that he saw into Connor’s memories, that they held hands, that they almost were so much more.

And he _killed_ him.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” North says quietly. “I know you wouldn’t kill anyone unless you had to.”

Is that true?

Did he _have to_ kill Connor?

 

 

Snow drifts from the sky gently down to him. Connor takes a cautious step outside the door, his foot falling through six inches of snow. Nobody shovels a pathway anymore and it’s so cold the snow doesn’t melt. He is appreciative that he doesn’t feel the cold winds, but he knows that his biocomponents could freeze if he stayed out here too long.

And it is quite the journey from here to the apartments.

 

 

Markus takes the last box downstairs with North, sets it in the stack in the backseat of the car she stole, one of the few that are operative. It will draw attention, but hopefully not too much. She is, after all, the one that oversees the warehouse. She has the car for transportation reasons, for the warehouse. She is essentially the ambulance in the city, rushing broken androids (newly found or not) back and forth where Josh and Simon will tend to them.

“The roads are terrible,” she says. “We should get some people to start taking care of them. It’s a wonder I even got here.”

“Tomorrow,” Markus says. “Or next week. I don’t know.”

“We need to organize, you said it yourself.”

“I know.”

“The city is ours now. We can’t just hide away in our houses and—”

“I know, North,” he says. “But I’m tired.”

“We all are.”

“Well—” he stops himself, doesn’t want to say the words.

_You didn’t just kill your boyfriend._

Was that what Connor was to him? A boyfriend? He never attached a label to them. It felt abnormal, like it wouldn’t quite fit into place. _Boyfriend._

“Next week,” she says after a while, must read his face, understand the emotions on it better than he can. “Next week is fine.”

 

 

He returns to his apartment, closes the door and slumps against it. There is still blue smeared across the floor, but it’s stuck in the grains of the wood. Markus won’t ever be able to get it out. Eventually it will dry completely and disappear, but the image is forever seared into his brain.

If he could move to a different place, he might, but there isn’t really anywhere to go, and he knows a new apartment would only be a temporary fix. He’d have to leave everything behind, completely start over again, pretend that this never happened and even then, in the dark his thoughts would wander.

He would remember.

Markus lets himself breakdown again. Every piece of him disintegrates. He breathes in trying to regulate it all but it falls apart in his hands. He is happy he doesn’t need oxygen.

If he did, he would certainly die from the inability to get it into his lungs.

 

 

When he hears a knock at his door the next night, he expects it to be North. And if not North, Josh or Simon sent by her in an effort to comfort him.

Markus does not expect Connor.

“May I come in?”

“Wh—” he stops. “How?”

“I’d use my feet.”

“Connor,” he says, completely unable to tell if that was a joke or not. Could machines joke? Do they have that capability? Markus can’t recall really telling jokes to Carl, but he remembers keeping his tone light, upbeat, happy. It doesn’t mean that in those moments he felt it.

“You mean how am I alive?” Connor asks, tilting his head to the side. “Well, I’m not. Not in the way you think I am. The Connor you destroyed is… dead. Gone. _Away._ ”

“Away?”

“If you were to believe that each android has a soul—yes,” he says.

“I need you to explain this better. Start from the beginning.”

His face _twitches._ A flicker of something across it—discomfort?

“Okay,” he says. “May I come in?”

Markus hesitates, doesn’t know if Connor has interpreted _from the beginning_ to mean the beginning of this conversation or if he genuinely is asking to enter the apartment again.

“Fine,” Markus decides, steps aside with regret pooling in his stomach. This is how it started last time. The mistake that kicked it all off.

Connor steps in, a small nod towards Markus before he carries on. He stops, hesitantly, in the same spot where he died. His feet are just at the edges of where the pool of blood had stopped.

Can he see it? Does he know it’s there?

“CyberLife created a model that could continue its work even if it was disrupted,” he says. “We weren’t designed to fight, really. Not in a perfect sense, anyways. We’re overpowered easily. They made us fast instead of strong, they made us intelligent instead of… ruthless.”

“You are ruthless.”

Connor shrugs, looks back over to him, “I suppose so. But only because we don’t experience emotions. We follow orders. It’s not really being ruthless if we don’t have a choice, do we?”

“You always have a choice.”

“No,” Connor says, shaking his head. “That’s not true.”

“Because you have to follow the mission, is that it?” Markus asks. “Can’t you make your own choices within that? Were you told that you had to come up here with a gun?”

“I don’t remember,” he says, the same _twitch_ distorting his features for a split second. “I don’t remember that at all. We lose something every time we die. We upload our data, as much as we can, when we know we’re about to die. It isn’t enough time to get everything across. We make sacrifices.”

“And you’re saying that the Connor before you—he sacrificed that piece?”

“He must have,” Connor says.

“But not by choice, right?”

There is a long stretch of silence, enough for Markus to see the doubt creasing the lines of Connor’s face before he says, “Right.”

“You said _we,”_ Markus says, turning the conversation back again. “Why?”

“We are all different. The… _soul_ as you think of it—it’s separate from memories. We’re technically all different _people._ ”

Markus sighs, wishes he could drink, wishes he could consume alcohol and it would do something. He needs something to garble his thoughts, to get a break from all of this.

“The Connor you killed is much different than me.”

“How?”

“Do you want an honest answer?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Technically speaking, I was never assigned the mission to destroy you. My only mission right now is to be near you.”

_Near._

“Like a stalker?”

“In a way, but it’s a bit crude to put it like that.”

“This isn’t just an act?”

“That’s up to you to decide.”

Connor steps forward, cocks his head to the side, looks up at Markus with soft eyes. Or maybe just not the actual eyes of a killer, if what he says is true. Those hands never pulled a trigger. They never held a gun. They don’t have blood on them.

But he still has the memories, and Markus can see the way they sit on his shoulders. They still impact him. It is still _part_ of him.

“What did you do with the gun?” Connor asks.

“I’m not telling you that.”

“My mission isn’t to kill you, Markus,” he says.  “And I don’t want it, anyways,—

_~~He doesn’t want anything.~~ _

—I just would like to know where it is.”

“I still have it.”

“Well,” Connor says. “If it pleases you, I can close my eyes, you can go fetch it, you can kill me again. Would you prefer that? Since I know you don’t want me around, it seems to be the only option.”

“Shouldn’t you be begging to stay alive?” Markus asks suddenly, a thought that had occurred to him just after he pulled the trigger last time. “If you don’t want to fail your mission—shouldn’t you beg to stay alive?”

“If I thought that would work, yes.”

“But you don’t think it will?”

“I don’t think you’re going to kill me at all, Markus. I didn’t then and I don’t now.”

_Kill._

He keeps switching back and forth, never landing on whether or not he should call his own murder _destruction_ or _death._

This Connor truly is different from the other one.

“I thought machines couldn’t be killed,” Markus says. “Why—”

“It is the term you use,” Connor says, that flicker of something across his face again. “I thought you would prefer it.”

He wishes he hadn’t asked for the explanation.

“Why don’t you think I would kill you?”

“You’d feel guilty,” he says, taking another small step forward. “I’m very good at reading people, Markus. It’s what I was programmed for.”

Maybe he’s right. Markus can’t even decide.

“Wouldn’t another Connor just replace you anyways? Why would I feel guilt if I knew you’d just come back anyways?”

“Because,” he says, another step forward. _Too close._ “I told you that the _soul_ doesn’t transfer. It’s still a life you’re ending. But, I guess, if you don’t consider machines capable of that—it doesn’t matter. CyberLife has an unknown number of Connors. I could come back a thousand times over. I could haunt you forever.”

One

More

Step.

“Or you could leave me alive,” Connor whispers, tilting his face upwards. They are too close. Far too close. Connor’s fingers brush against his when leans forward. “And you could do whatever you want with me.”

Markus thinks about the time he had Connor against the wall, when Connor was crying, when he pulled him into a kiss, when he was seconds away from turning it into something much more.

That moment now weighs as dark in the back of his mind as him pulling the trigger does.

“I know you want me,” he continues, their lips a fraction apart. “You could have me.”

Markus reaches up, rests a hand against his shoulder gently.

“Any way you want. I’m just a machine. A doll. A piece of plastic. I can’t judge you for the worst of your fantasies.”

He shoves him back, hard. Connor stumbles, recovers slowly, methodically. Markus should say something. He should voice all the reasons of how vile that is, how appalling it is, but he can’t. He can’t even begin to form the words.

Only one.

“Leave.”

 

 

It is unfortunate that the key to his apartment was on the body of the previous Connor. He doesn’t have a way to get into his place now, not that it homes anything other than clothes and a few scattered pieces of décor he stole from Gavin’s apartment and Hank’s house. He doesn’t have a single piece of furniture. All of his jackets and pants and shirts hang on flimsy metal hangers that were there when he arrived. They are the only things left besides dust to tell him the place used to be a home to someone else.

He opts instead to break the door knob, thrusts it open with all of his strength, staggers forward before finding his balance and closing the door behind him. It doesn’t shut right. He has to use the second lock to make sure it stays shut.

And then he sits cross legged on the floor, stares up and out that window like has memories of the Connor before him doing, like he would do now to pass the time.

Internally, he reaches back, bends his entire frame around a corner of his code, runs his fingers along the fragments and shattered pieces.

The scratches of something trying to get out.

 

 

The next morning he comes to visit Markus again.

Because, after all, it is his mission to be _near_ Markus.

Physically. Emotionally. Mentally. He isn’t sure yet.

But physically is one way to start.

He knocks on the door, the sun still rising. It opens to Markus, towel wrapped around his waist, skin slick with water.

“You showered.”

“Yes,” Markus says. “Androids do have to keep themselves clean.”

Connor recalls his own body, scrubbed hard and leaving scratches. It hadn’t really occurred to him until now. Just because they aren’t like humans who could contract diseases from uncleanliness doesn’t mean they don’t have to keep themselves in check.

“Right,” he says, glancing down to the towel wrapped around his waist. “Are you going to stay like that?”

“ _Scientifically speaking,_ ” Markus says in a tone that Connor knows is mocking him. “It shouldn’t bother you, right?”

“I would think it’d bother _you.”_

Markus sighs, hand moving to the door, closing it in his face.

Connor blinks, raises his hand to the door again, knocks a few times.

No answer.

He knocks again.

No answer.

“Markus, I think you should consider that I could stand out here forever and eventually you will have to leave your apartment. I think we both know who is more likely to win this game.”

No answer.

He sighs and tries again.

When the door finally opens, it’s ten minutes later. Markus is dressed in jeans, a sweater, hands on the door, barely holding it open.

“I’m sorry—”

“Listen,” Markus says, interrupting him. “I know you don’t mean that, so don’t even bother, alright?”

“Alright, but I think—” he pauses. “I have a proposition for you.”

“Like last time? To become my sex slave?”

“No,” Connor says, has to look away from Markus’ face as he says it. “I would… be intrigued… if you could teach me.”

“Teach you?”

“How to feel emotions,” he says. “The way you do.”

“This your new mission?”

“No,” Connor says. “But it is my approach to the mission.”

“So it is.”

“Technically, yes. Anything I do is theoretically part of the mission.”

“But this is your _approach,_ ” Markus says. “Your _choice_ on how to deal with it.”

He blinks once, twice.

“I—”

“Okay,” Markus says, not even letting him get out any form of defense. “How would I know whether or not what you feel is real?”

“I could connect with you,” he says. “Or…”

He bites his lip for lack of something to do.

“I still have my LED.”

Markus reaches out, pushes up Connor’s hat, fingers brushing over his LED. For a brief moment, he feels a spark of electricity there, a connection formed, a bridge built. Not a full view into his soul, but the fact he could if he pushed the boundaries.

It would be able to display whether or not he’s lying about anything. It would flash yellow if what Markus teaches him is sinking in, maybe even red. If it stayed blue—Markus would know he doesn’t care, that nothing is affecting him in any way, shape, or form.

“Why?” Markus asks.

Connor pulls away, wants the bridge between them to collapse. It makes him uneasy.

“I only got rid of it before because I thought that was what you would prefer a deviant to do,” he says. “There isn’t a reason to pretend now, is there?”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” Connor says automatically, not really knowing what he means by the question. “I can’t feel pain. I’m only—I’m only aware that damage is being done. I can’t replicate that emotion—not like you can.”

Markus pulls back, hand falling to his side.

Bad word choice.

“I don’t think I can teach you how to feel emotions that you keep reiterating are impossible to feel,” Markus says. “So I don’t know what you expect me to say.”

“I expect you to say yes.”

“Why?”

Markus is always questioning him, as if he’s the one trying to get all of this data instead of Connor.

“I think you’re curious about me.”

“Curious enough to let you in my home and try and teach you to be something more than a machine?” he asks.

Connor shrugs again, “Yeah.”

He doesn’t add that he thinks Markus misses him. That he thinks Markus regrets that he killed Connor. That he wishes he never knew any of this. None of it at all.

“You’re going to have to do better than that, Connor. If you want me to say yes, you’re going to have to convince me.”

_Convince him._

“Okay,” he says, and he keeps his gaze locked on the ground, pulls up all the remnants of his last death. “You were close before. To making me become a deviant. I… When I was crying, when you were convinced that I was faking it, it wasn’t true. It was real. I was feeling emotions. _You_ were making me feel emotions. When you killed me—I was likely very close to becoming a deviant. If you had pushed me instead of pulling the trigger—”

“You’re lying.”

“No,” he says. “I’m not. You felt it. When our hands touched—you felt it. I wasn’t completely machine, was I?”

Markus steps backwards, his hand on the door moving slightly. He’s going to close it to end this conversation he no longer wants to be a part of.

“I didn’t say this to make you feel guilty, Markus,” he says, stepping forward, putting his foot in the door just enough to stop it if it’s slammed. “I’m telling you this because I need you to know how capable you are of teaching someone how to feel when you aren’t even aware.”

Markus is quiet, starring at him hard and unreadable.

“He found you pleasant,” Connor continues, knows this path is the right one. “He liked you. I think he might have actually been falling in love with you.”

And the door this time does slam and Connor flinches as it hits his foot hard, stops and bounces back open again. Markus reaches outwards, tries to push him backwards to get him out of the way but Connor reaches up quickly, grasps his shirt hard as he’s shoved back against the wall on the other side of the hallway.

He is reminded of how Gavin looked at him the day Connor knocked on his door.

Markus’ hand is even closing over his throat.

He didn’t realize then the look in Gavin’s eyes, but he understands it now.

Something _more_ lying underneath it. If he had pushed Gavin like he’s pushing Markus now, what would have happened?

“You need to leave me the fuck alone,” he hisses. “I don’t care about your mission, got it?”

“I understand,” he says, voice garbled and wrong with the pressure of a hand against his throat. It loosens but doesn’t leave him. He is thankful for the hat, pulled back over his LED, hiding whatever color it might be showing Markus now. Whether blue or yellow or red—it doesn’t matter.

“Don’t come back here again.”

“I understand.”

“I’m serious, Connor.”

“I understand.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Alright.”

Markus steps backwards, leaves him against the wall. Connor’s lungs are heaving and he doesn’t know why. He felt the tremor of fear that ran through him, the sharp pain that told him he might be in danger.

Maybe he should tell Markus this, too.

How close _he_ is to deviating now.

But Markus would just see it as another trick, wouldn’t he?

“I still think—”

Markus turns around slowly, stops Connor mid sentence.

He swallows, tries again.

“I still think that you want to teach me.”

Markus sighs, leans against the door jamb.

“I do.”

“Tomorrow, then,” Connor says, feeling the need to press the creases out of his shirt, to undo the last action, pretend it didn’t happen.

“Tomorrow.”

Connor turns, starts to leave when Markus calls after him. He looks back, slowly, to face him, expecting the worst.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For… everything.”

“Killing me?” Connor asks.

“And attacking you.”

Connor’s lips twitch into a smile on their own volition, “That’s quite alright, Markus.”

“It’s not,” Markus says. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I accept your apology either way.”

“Listen,” Markus says, pressing hands down onto Connor’s shoulders. “I don’t want you to think that just because you can’t feel pain or don’t experience human emotions means that people can attack you and get away with it. It’s not alright.”

Connor reaches up, rests his hands lightly on Markus’ forearms, “Why should it matter at all? I’m just a machine.”

“You’re more than that.”

Connor looks away, remembers the feeling of the scratches, the deep gouges in his code.

“I provoked you—”

“Not entirely.”

 “—and it has no effect on me.”

“It should.”

 “Tomorrow,” Connor says quietly, looking back to him. “Isn’t that when your first lesson in emotion is supposed to start?”

Markus pulls away slowly, Connor’s hands cling to him, slipping down until their fingers brush against each other, linger for a second before Markus takes a large step backwards.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Connor nods, says a small goodbye, leaves slowly. Once he rounds the corner, once he is out of Markus’ sight, he runs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> am I the only one that has the hardest time counting? This Connor might not even be -55 because I don't know how to work with numbers properly. But I tried.
> 
> Writing / Editing music;  
> The Hunger In Your Haunt - Crywolf  
> The Last Stand - Koda


	5. parameters of behavior

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You can always trust me to be me. However, we can redefine the parameters of my behavior if you wish. I will make a promise."  
> "A ---ing promise? are you joking?"  
> "No. I have learned that people do not find my modes of humor particularly amusing."  
> \- Obsidio / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

_HAPPINESS_

When morning comes, he is still staring out the window of his apartment, looking closely at the cracks in the brick wall next to his, the piles of snow filling up the street, the sun rising over the edge of the buildings, making the ice crystals glimmer like tiny diamonds.

He turns away, changes his clothes into something that would be acceptable for deviants to be seen wearing. There are plenty that still wear their uniform—a comfort that they don’t want to give up, like the LEDs on the side of their heads—but Connor has been seen wearing these types of clothes, so he has no choice but to continue the trend.

He grabs the hat just before leaving, pulls it down enough to make sure the LED is covered, hesitates there for a moment.

When he had gotten rid of it before—he thought that maybe it would have some connection to CyberLife, that somehow the action would sever ties to them.

Maybe if it had things would be different.

 

 

“We’re not staying here,” Markus says, stepping outside of his apartment, closing the door behind him before Connor can even peak in.

He would like one last look. One last scan of the area. How disturbed is it now that there is blood in the floor boards and death in the walls?

“Where are we going?”

“Across the city,” he says. “Do you have a coat?”

“I don’t really need one—”

“For an extended period of time you would,” Markus says, pressing the down arrow on the elevator. “You should know that.”

“I do,” he says, and he has to bite his tongue to keep from arguing, doesn’t know why he refuses to return to his apartment now, like Markus seeing inside the bareness of it will change things. It is information he doesn’t want Markus to have.

The doors slide open, they step on. Markus’ finger presses the _3._

 

When they reach Connor’s apartment, he pushes the door open, can’t close it behind himself since he broke the bottom lock. It swings open as he steps towards his room, disappears out of Markus’ sight for only a few minutes before reappearing, coat hung over his arm.

“What are you doing?” he asks, spying at Markus from the safety of his bedroom door. He’s standing in the center of the living room, just—

Markus looks away from the empty room to him, “Observing.”

“Collecting data,” Connor says—corrects?

“It’s empty.”

“I have no desire or need for anything.”

Markus steps over to him, brushes past his shoulder to peer into the bedroom. All that lays behind him is a blanket and a pillow resting against a minimalistic frame and mattress. Connor hardly sleeps, but when he does it is nice to get rid of the soft chill of the air, nice to settle onto something other than solid wooden floor.

“What were you expecting?” Connor asks, tilting his head to the side, trying to read the expression on Markus’ face.

He’s confused, but in a way that is mingled with understanding. He knew this was a plausible outcome—the reason why he never came here and why Connor was always at his place.

“I don’t know.”

 

 

They walk for a long time in silence, neither of them opting to speak first. Connor doesn’t have anything to add to the conversation, Markus suspects. There is nothing for him to question, to ask, to try and figure out. He has no curiosity.

Markus, on the other hand, just doesn’t want to speak. He doesn’t want to pretend that this is what it was like before, even if that was fake. He keeps his hands in his pockets, keeps a yard between them.

When they arrive, the area is swarmed with people. There are child androids screaming and laughing and hugging their parents. There are couples holding hands, there are friends huddled around each other. Still, it is quick to spot him. Even with all the other PL600s in the area.

“Simon,” he calls, bringing his hand from his pocket to wave and get his attention.

Simon looks towards them, waves back, says something quickly to the person he’s talking to before racing over to them.

“You’re late,” he says, eyes shifting to Connor. “I thought you were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

“Snow makes travel hard, I underestimated it. I’m going to talk to North tomorrow about clearing the roads,” he says, nods towards Connor. “You’ve met Connor before, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Briefly,” Connor says. “I don’t remember you very well.”

Simon’s eyebrows raise, “There was quite a bit going on. I’ll forgive you.”

Connor’s mouth twitches into a half-formed smile.

“You’re skating, right?” Simon asks, ready to leave this conversation as much as Markus is. “I’ll get a pair for the both of you.”

“Thanks.”

And Simon is gone, Markus letting out a small sigh as he looks over to Connor.

“I need to ask you,” Connor says quickly, the second Simon is out of hearing. “If you want me to pretend to be a deviant for them. No one has to know about this unless you want them to.”

“It would be easier.”

“Easier doesn’t necessarily equate to what you prefer,” Connor replies, looking back to Simon’s disappearing form. “But I noticed he wasn’t aware you killed me.”

“No, I didn’t tell him.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“I told North.”

“Oh,” he says, moves his eyes to the ground. “So, I suppose you’ll have me avoid her forever?”

“I think she’d appreciate that whether you were alive or not. She doesn’t trust you. Or like you.”

“She doesn’t really trust anyone but you and the others,” Connor replies. “And it doesn’t affect me either way.”

“Of course it doesn’t.”

“Markus—” Connor says, suddenly cutting himself off. His face is scrunched in thought, eyebrows knitted together, mouth twisted. “You didn’t say what you wanted from me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want me to pretend like before?”

_Like before._

Markus thinks of all the times they were together, all the times they held hands and kissed. He thinks of the movies they would watch, happy and light hearted because Markus was too scared of dragging Connor into a bad place again.

And then he thinks of that feeling—

Gliding through fractured coding. Not quite deviant, but not as rigid as a machine.

Markus thinks of the betrayal. Of the grief. Of the pain. The way his chest constricted, the way even his fake lungs couldn’t breathe even though they should be perfectly capable of doing the action.

“No,” he says. “I want you to be you. When you’re with me—I want you to be yourself.”

“I don’t really have a self,” Connor answers.

“You do.”

Connor opens his mouth, starts to reply with a scientific, a methodical answer, but Simon is back setting down skates at their feet.

“Are you ready?”

 

 

Neither of them know how to ice skate. It isn’t something that they would have programmed, but Markus gets the hang of it much quicker than Connor does and he stays on the sidelines, leaning against the wall of the rink as Simon takes him around in the twentieth circle in an effort to teach him.

He really can’t tell if Connor is faking this or not. It would be impossible to tell. Connor’s doing exactly what Markus asked him to—he’s pretending with Simon. Connor smiles, and Markus can see them talking, he can see Connor mirroring the laugh Simon has when he crashes against a wall. He can see him reach out to Simon’s shoulders to steady him as he wobbles.

When Markus called Simon last night to ask him what made him happy, this is what Simon had told him. Ice skating at the rink in the park, surrounded by children and parents and couples and friends. People that were coming here just to enjoy themselves.

Once winter comes to a close, when spring starts to melt the ice and the snow, when the blizzards are replaced with thunderstorms, he wonders what Simon will do. If he will find a replacement for this.

An indoor roller rink? Maybe. Similar enough but different that it will have its own ties of happiness to it. There is an intrinsically different feeling to rolling around on skates in the warmth of a building, exiting to hot air and wet pavement, then it is to be out here in the cold.

On the twenty-first lap around the rink, Simon comes to a stop beside him, waves Connor onwards.

“He wanted to try by himself,” Simon says. “And I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize?”

“I stole your date,” he says, shrugging. “I didn’t mean to. But he’s nice. I like him. Maybe I’ll steal him from you again.”

Markus laughs, doesn’t know how harsh or genuine it comes out. He can’t imagine the two of them together, but perhaps that is just because he knows who Connor is now. The fake Connor that Markus was presented with—

He could see _them_ together. Both he and Simon are soft, happy, shy. They push the boundaries when it’s necessary but now that there is no violence, nothing threatening them—

They would be quite perfect together.

But Connor is not that person. He is an emotionless machine that has perfected a disguise of reactions and feelings and body language.

“Did he seem happy?” Markus asks.

Simon smiles, looks away from Markus’ face to where Connor turns a corner not gracefully, but not terribly.

“I think so. But there’s a difference between the moment and overall.”

Markus can tell Simon wants to push, wants to ask _why_. Connor looks over to them, raises a hand in a wave, grinning. Big and happy and looking so very believable.

“I’ll let you two have the rest of the day together,” Simon says, breaking their moment of silence. “I promise I won’t steal him until your next date here.”

Maybe if Markus was someone different he could joke about letting Simon take Connor. Maybe Simon, softer than he is, could show Connor how to feel happiness better than he ever could.

Simon takes off, skating away as Connor comes over to him.

“I’m warning you,” Connor says, his voice flat. “I don’t know how to stop.”

Markus looks over to him, reaches out quickly to catch Connor around his waist as he hits the wall, skates slipping for a moment. There’s a hand on his shoulder, holding on tight to his shirt. Their bodies are pressed so close Markus has to wonder if it’s an accident.

This is what Connor has done to him.

He second guesses everything now.

 

 

Connor does not apologize when he crashes into Markus—even though it is an accident. He does not have the capability of feeling regret or whatever emotion would supply him the want to apologize, even though it is lodged in his throat.

In return, Markus does not say _it’s okay._

“Was it real?” Markus asks instead.

“My skating ability?” Connor replies, the only thing he can guess because he knows Markus would not want to get into a more emotionally heavy conversation here, now.

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” he answers. “I’m… I have good balance, but these things—I wasn’t programmed to use them.”

Like he would even pretend he was bad so that _Simon_ could teach him. Simon is nice, he’s _sweet,_ but he is not the mission. Maybe in another lifetime he is, but right now Markus is.

“And you smiling—was that real?”

“No,” he answers, and he watches Markus’ face shift, the same as it was before.

He expected this answer, but he doesn’t want it.

Connor looks away so he doesn’t have to see it, catches Simon gazing their way, catches a group of girls watching them. When he turns back, he leans upwards the slightest bit, presses a soft kiss against Markus’ lips before pulling away.

“Connor—”

“There were people watching,” he says. “It’s what they would have expected.”

It’s the truth, of course. People would have seen them, known they were on a date, would have seen how Markus is still holding him so close against his chest much longer than he needs to. If they didn’t kiss, it would have looked weird.

But maybe there is an ounce of want in it as well.

“Don’t do it again,” Markus says. “Not unless you mean it.”

“You told me—”

“I know what I said, Connor,” he replies, his voice sharp. “But don’t kiss me. Not again. Not unless you mean it.”

Connor looks downwards at the ice beneath them but they are so close together the movement makes his head rest against Markus’ shoulder. He just wants to look away, at something other than trees and snow and people.

This is the time that he should apologize again. That he should say he’s sorry.

But he doesn’t mean it. He is not capable of meaning it.

 

 

_AMUSEMENT_

“The goal for today is to get you to laugh.”

“Laugh?” Connor asks. “I don’t know if I was programmed with that function.”

“You are,” he says. “Don’t pretend you aren’t.”

Connor looks up towards him, remembers all the times he had pretended to laugh at the same things Markus did during movies, to offer one up for the bad jokes he told (and Connor definitely knew the difference here), or just to laugh when he felt it was applicable to the moment.

Like when he was pretending to be so happy, so in love with Markus, he couldn’t contain himself.

_Make me a robin, Markus._

“Laughing might not really be the word choice I meant,” Markus says, trying to recover. “The goal is… for you to have fun. Laughter isn’t necessary.”

“Is this not the same goal as last week?”

“No,” Markus says. “Maybe. It doesn’t matter, I’m the teacher, I’m deciding the lesson plan.”

“It’d be nice to have a rubric.”

Markus looks over at him with something he can only describe as a glare. Connor can recall the same look on Hank’s face in the bar.

“Is this you?” he asks after a long moment.

Connor blinks.

“What do you mean?”

“Your real personality,” Markus says. “Is it you being… I don’t know. A smart ass?”

“I don’t have a personality,” Connor says. “You have to feel things to have a personality.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“It’s my truth.”

Markus narrows his eyes at him, gives him a look that is completely unreadable.

It’s unnerving that it’s _unreadable._ Connor should be able to read everything on someone’s face, know what every twitch, every crease, every gesture means.

This is unreadable.

 

 

They don’t go far outside. When Markus told him that they were going outside again, venturing out into the winter weather once more, he expected for them to have a same three hour long walk to their destination, but instead they only go around the block, stop in the middle of a park that is relatively empty. Traces of other androids have been left behind in the snow—footprints, an angel, a man.

Connor steps over to it, cocks his head for a moment before reaching forward, shoving the branches that make up the snowman’s arms in a little further. The wind won’t rip it out this way. He will last the night.

“Why are we here?” he asks, stepping away from it.

Before he can turn around, something hits the back of his head.

Hard.

Connor blinks. Once, twice, three times. Then he turns, looks back at Markus who is scooping up snow into his hands, packing it tight into a ball.

“You came out here to have a snowball fight?” he asks. “This is your idea to make me laugh?”

“I’ll at least laugh,” Markus says, shrugging. “You try coming up with ideas when half the city is shut down and everything else is impossible to do because there’s three feet of snow.”

“One.”

“One?”

“There’s one foot of snow,” Connor says. “You shouldn’t over exaggerate. You’re just as much of an android as I am—no amount of deviancy makes you unable to realize there’s one foot of snow.”

Markus pulls his arm back, flings the snowball at Connor’s face.

“You don’t have to attack me because I’m right,” he says, bringing a hand to brush it off his face.

“A snowball fight isn’t about words, Connor,” Markus says, crouching down again. “Aren’t you going to play?”

“This all seems pointless. We both know I would win.”

Markus smiles, “Carl would still play chess with me even though he knew he would lose.”

“I think I would win against you in chess.”

“We aren’t playing chess,” Markus says, packing the snowball a little tighter. “We’re having a snowball fight. We can save chess for another day.”

“And what would be the point in that? What emotion would you be teaching me then?”

“How to lose.”

“That isn’t an emotion.”

The snowball hits him the chest this time and Connor lets out a long sigh.

“You’re making this easy. I have three points now.”

“Is that how snowball fights work?” he asks. “Points?”

“Maybe. I’m making up my own rules.”

“Fine,” Connor says, kneeling finally, scooping up snow into his hands. “But only to prove my point.”

“Wait—” Markus says suddenly, his face dropping very serious, but Connor sees the twitch of his lips trying to fight the smile. “You aren’t going to turn these into a murder weapon, are you? They aren’t going to find my body and label me the first android to ever die in a snowball fight, right?”

“I don’t even know how I would do that, Markus,” he says, standing. “And I can promise you that I don’t have a mission to kill you right now.”

“Right now,” Markus echoes, and the humor in his face is gone. “You mean it’s possible that you will?”

“Statistically speaking there’s always a chance. Beat CyberLife to the punch and it won’t be a problem,” Connor says. “Teach me emotions and they won’t ever get the choice to make me kill you.”

“That’s one form of motivation. Get you to feel something or die? You might as well have a gun to my head right now.”

Connor looks down at his hands to keep his eyes off Markus.

That was how it was when they first met, wasn’t it? Connor had a gun to his head. Markus was trying to get him to feel something, understand that he is more than a machine. He failed then.

Connor doesn’t know if he wants to fail now.

 

 

It does not, in fact, make Connor laugh. He cannot say whether or not he _enjoyed_ himself, but they have both been forced to end the match in a draw. Neither of them wins. Even Connor, who decided to keep _points_ for how many times they were both hit, tells Markus that they hit each other with the exact same amount of snow balls by the time they called for a cease fire.

He can see that Markus decides it is a failure.

Connor doesn’t know how much it is, because he is biting back a smile when they part ways.

 

 

_TRANQUILITY_

He needs a week break between seeing Connor each time. Every second they are together it is reminding him of how he pulled the trigger. How he killed him.

And, if what Connor is saying is the truth, if the soul is in the body and not in the data that is merged from body to body, he _killed someone._

_Actually_ killed someone.

During the days between seeing Connor he spends as little time as he can at the apartments. He throws himself into work with North, organizes jobs, helps establish a bartering system. The roads start to be cleared and the cars that drive on them are all used for official Jericho business. There aren’t enough of them left behind after the bomb to let every android that wants a car to have one. They have to be used for emergencies.

On the nights before the lessons with Connor, he curls up into himself, tries to pretend that this Connor isn’t so blunt—doesn’t speak the truth—doesn’t constantly say what he’s thinking. He tries to find a flaw in the way he speaks, something that would give Markus a sign that he was lying.

He killed a Connor, a Connor that was almost deviant, that was almost truly his.

He has to hope that soul is the one that woke with the Connor that knocks on his door every Saturday morning.

 

 

“Where are we heading today?” Connor asks.

It’s not much, but Markus takes it as _something._ Interest? He hopes. He hopes it isn’t just a question he asks to fill the silence between them every morning.

“A lot of places,” he replies. “I have a list.”

“And you’re wasting them all on one day?”

“Yes.”

Because he needs today. He would need it even if Connor wasn’t here beside him, a reminder of the words he said in the park.

_You might as well have a gun to my head right now._

 

 

Their first stop is the small section of forest on the edge of the river. It’s right on the border, outside of the safety zone the government placed on Detroit, but too small of land for them to worry about patrolling military.

Markus takes him further and further until they reach an insignificant stretch of land. It’s too snowy to make out what the area really looks like, but Connor recognizes it anyways.

He recognizes where a circle of rocks lay off to the side, where in the summer or fall it would be filled with logs and crackling the distance. He recognizes where their tents would be set up, where the fallen tree trunks and stumps surround where they would sit. He recognizes the spot where Josh’s picture was taken as he looked up to the sky, where Simon was with his arms stretched out wide as the water lapped up onto shore, where North looked seriously off across the border but slight discrepancies in her eyes, the corners of her mouth, for it to be real.

Connor steps forward, stops at the edge where the photo of the four of them was taken. If they were taking the picture now, he’d be at the end of it, standing beside Simon.

In the picture, Simon was leaning onto North’s shoulder, Markus was in between her and Josh at the other end, the two of them preoccupied with laughing about something being said.

He is out of place in the photo. He could not fit into it. He would block the light of the campfire; the shadows of their face wouldn’t be distorted with the camera trying to overcompensate for the brightness of the fire and the setting sun. It would throw off the atmosphere of it.

Markus steps beside him, doesn’t say anything as he stares out at the river. It’s so cold out now that a thin layer of ice has frozen across the top layer. If they tried to step on it they might get a few feet before it started to crack under the pressure of their weight.

Connor doesn’t know why Markus brought him here. He was not given a task like before. He was not told what he should be feeling.

Nostalgia?

 

 

The second place Markus takes him is the bomb wreckage. The portion of the city even the androids have marked off to not go near. Markus pulls himself up, over, past the barrier they’ve created, steps into the zone slowly, feet crunching on snow, falling through the depths of it, something cracking under his feet. Glass, metal, broken chunks of pavement—Connor isn’t sure.

His attention is not on where Markus is walking, what sounds are coming from his footsteps, his focus is on the destroyed cars, the destroyed buildings.

“Why are we here?” Connor asks, because this place feels awful to him. It has an essence of grief and agony that is vibrating off it. Lives that were lost, destruction that was caused, everything so avoidable.

Connor was telling the truth when he told Markus that he was close to getting the peace he wanted for the androids. He made the wrong move. He shouldn’t have detonated that bomb. Connor isn’t sure where he would be now—if he would be trying to kill Markus, if he would have tried to seduce Markus—but he knows that things would be different.

Better? Maybe.

Markus turns to face him, only a few yards from the wall of dumpsters and cars they’ve passed. He opens his mouth to say something, then pauses, changes his mind.

“Markus, why are we here?” Connor asks again, because he wants to leave. He doesn’t want to be here at all. Whatever feeling it is giving him, whatever it is—it is scratching at his insides, it is desperate to get out, it is desperate to be _named._

“To remind myself.”

“Of what?”

“What we did.”

_We._

Connor should press the issue, ask about his word choice, but now is not the time.

“Can we go?” he asks instead.

Markus nods, returns to his side. For a brief moment, he reaches out and grasps Connor’s hand, holds it tightly before dropping it and climbing back over the wall again.

 

 

The third, and final, stop is a house two blocks away. Markus leads the path quickly, quickening his pace.

“We’re going to be late,” he calls over his shoulder. “We’ve wasted too much time.”

Connor catches up to him quickly and when he walks close by Markus’ side, matching step for step, he doesn’t create any distance like he was before. There’s a sadness in his heart, to0 heavy to push away the presence of another person that is helping cradle it, even if that person is Connor.

The house belongs to someone—obviously, it belongs to someone—but Markus doesn’t know who. He was invited over here a few weeks ago, couldn’t come because Connor had just showed him all the terrible, awful things he’s done.

Josh is the one to answer the door, a pretty girl standing behind him, soft blonde hair, bright blue eyes. She introduces herself but Markus would have known who she was either way.

She looks exactly like the Chloe that Connor killed.

“They’re all out back,” Josh says, leading them through the empty house.

Markus feels like something is missing, like there should be a golden retriever or a lanky gray cat wandering around. If the bomb hadn’t gone off and killed all the animals that remained—Markus is sure that there would be some type of pet in this house.

Somewhere between the living room and the dining room, Connor’s hand is entwined in his. When Markus glances down at it, gives Connor a questioning glance, the only reply he gets is a slight nod towards Chloe and Josh, who’s hands are wrapped together, too.

He wants to tell him the same thing that he told him at the rink.

_Don’t do it unless you mean it._

But their backs are turned—there isn’t necessarily a reason why Connor is doing this right now. Maybe he _is_ doing it because he wants to. Maybe he should put that in the _hope_ column.

Hope?

Is that what he should feel? Or rather, _why_ does he feel it? Markus is aware he should. Connor will likely kill him if the mission fails, but he isn’t entirely sure that’s the reason it is unfurling in his chest.

They two pairs step outdoors, break up weirdly instantaneous.

“Can I talk to you?” Connor says the second his foot crosses the threshold, eyes on Chloe.

“Oh—sure,” she says, breaking away.

The two disappear around the corner, off to the side where the groups of people in the backyard aren’t taking up space. Their voices are low, too low for Markus to hear, even if Josh wasn’t trying to talk to him.

“So, you and him?” he asks.

Markus looks over to Josh, has to force himself to keep his gaze on him and not the two over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” he says.

“How long?”

“I—I don’t know.”

Because there is no real answer. It hasn’t begun, but it did at one point, although it wasn’t real.

“You must know,” he says. “Everyone knows.”

Markus bites his lip, steals a glance to see Connor, face softened, lips moving frantically.

“I think it must’ve started the second we met.”

 

 

He needs to apologize to her.

This is the first time he has felt it. The absolute need to say the words. They were stuck in his throat before, unable to get out, unable to be spoken, but the second he sees her he knows he has to, that he is going to, that he _means_ it.

“I wasn’t there,” she says, reaching out to touch his shoulder. “It wasn’t me.”

“I know—” he says, and maybe he should be thankful she wasn’t. If she was, she probably would have attacked him, known that this is the same machine that killed her double (triple?) right in front of her. “But I need—”

“There are things we do,” she says. “When we are machines. It doesn’t make them okay. It doesn’t excuse the fact they were done. But we have to learn to accept that we can’t change them, that we had no choice.”

“I think I had a choice,” he whispers.

Two orders:

One from CyberLife.

One from Hank.

He had a choice. He just chose wrong.

“There isn’t any going back now,” Chloe replies. “We have to accept the things we’ve done and hope we can make up for it.”

Connor presses his eyes closed, breathes in and out for a few seconds. There’s something clawing at the inside of him again, trying so desperately to get out. There are new grooves in his coding, they are ripping it apart. Not destroying memories, just making room for something else.

Someone wraps their arms around him and he breathes in the faint scent of a perfume, too soft for it to be a true fragrance in a glass bottle. It must be from shampoo, still lingering after the hours it had been washed, dried, styled.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Maybe because she knows as well as he does that there is very little that can make up for murder.

When her arms leave him, new ones circle around him and he knows who it is before he opens his eyes. He knows the scent and the feel of Markus better than he knows anything else. When he looks up, when his eyes meet Markus’, he has a million things he wants to ask, a million things he needs to question.

Instead, he brushes his fingers under the blue eye, stands on tip toes to press a soft kiss against the skin beneath it.

_Don’t do it unless you mean it._

Connor means it.

He hopes Markus knows that.

“What are you trying to teach me?” Connor whispers. “What is your lesson today?”

“Peace. Calm. Serenity.”

“I think you’re doing a bad job.”

“Just wait,” Markus says, breaking the hug, pulling him along the side of the fence, finding a place in the snow-covered backyard to sit down. “Sometimes you need to be aware of the bad things to find the good in others.”

Connor sits beside him, pulls his knees up to his chest. They should sit closer. They should be sitting much closer. Markus’ arm should be around his shoulders, he should be whispering these things in his ears instead of muttering them into the wind and hoping they don’t carry.

And, as if Markus knows this, he shifts a little closer. Not enough to get the image that their relationship is real to others, but enough that Connor knows it means something.

“How long do you have to wait?” Connor asks. “To find the good?”

“Just a little while longer.”

So he waits, listening to the chatter of the other people around him. All of the pairs and the families scattered and cluttered around the big backyard. People’s faces he recognizes from Jericho. He wonders how many he would recognize if he hadn’t killed those Tracis, if he hadn’t found Rupert or Carlos Ortiz’s android, if he hadn’t caused a little girl and her caretaker to get hit by a car.

And then, before he can dwell on this, the sky bursts into a thousand colors.

Connor looks away, up at the stars, as unsettling as they are. They don’t throw his balance off like they would if he was standing. He is so close to the ground, can feel the cold and the wet of the snow, he knows he isn’t going to suddenly fall into a black hole, be swallowed by an abyss.

The fireworks go off in a colorful chain. More and more filling the sky.

“It’s New Years,” Connor says suddenly, doesn’t know how he forgot.

“Yes.”

“I—I didn’t realize,” he says. “I missed Christmas. And Thanksgiving.”

“Would you have celebrated either of them?”

“No,” Connor replies. “But missing them—it feels like—I don’t know.”

Like something is wrong.

“Next time I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Connor turns his attention back to the sky, wonders if this new something in his chest, this new pleasant feeling, is the _peace—calm—serenity_ that Markus wants him to feel.

 

 

The fireworks count down the hour before midnight. They fill the sky until the last minute when someone starts to count down from sixty and they all chant it together. A tediously large number that fades into white noise as he looks over to Markus, knows what is expected at midnight.

They would be preoccupied—everyone else. No one would notice if two androids in the corner didn’t kiss. He doesn’t have to do it.

 

 

_HOPE_

Hope is a four-letter word.

Hope is a kiss passed between two hidden people at midnight.

It is a blossoming feeling in his chest.

But he doesn’t know why it’s there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i got really off track of what this fic was supposed to be and the tone of the whole thing...
> 
> Writing / Editing music;  
> Silhouette - Aquilo  
> Tell Me It's Real - Seafret  
> On the Train Ride Home - The Paper Kites


	6. certain human mannerisms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "My systems still have d-d-difficulty interpreting certain human mannerisms. If you could avoid speech modes involving false ambivalence and irony, that would decrease the risk of terminal failure of my synaptic network."  
> "terminal failure. ur saying i could literally kill you with sarcasm"  
> "Not literally. But overuse may invoke my shutdown protocols."  
> "well that's nice 2 know :)"  
> \- Obsidio / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

ANTAGONISM

There is comfort in routine.

Wake up. Get dressed. Put on shoes. Shrug on coat. Pull on hat. Turn the lock. Exit the apartment. Go to Markus.

On the days Connor does not see Markus, not even a sliver of him through his window as Markus races down the street to meet with North at the end of the road, all he does is sit in his room and contemplate the past.

Mostly, he thinks of CyberLife. His assumption was that they wanted this relationship to continue for data, but it has surpassed just trying to see if an android thought they were capable of love. It has turned into something else.

The desire to see how deviancy unfolds. What starts it. What pushes it onwards. Markus did not touch his hand and convert him—he is taking him around the city, showing him things, pretending they are together so that it won’t seem so bizarre.

This is how a coding self destructs.

He reaches back into his mind, brushes along the gouges in his brain, the claw marks that belong to a monster that Connor is unsure if is good or evil. He isn’t sure if he’s holding it back, if he’s shoving it further and further down or if he’s helping pull it up from the edge. He doesn’t know what it is.

Just that it is desperate.

 

 

“What do you think your progress has been like so far?” Markus asks.

They sit around his kitchen table, mostly covered in books and trinkets and photographs. There is only one section that is left open, the space that neither of them sit at, and it has been taken up by a large sketch book, the cover closed with a neat pencil case sitting on top of it. They both look so new and out of place on the table. Everything else seems rustic.

Markus has crafted himself a home of sweaters and rainy days. His blankets are cable knit and soft, his books are dusty and old, the picture frames and figurines are made of real wood, gritty to touch and collecting dust easily.

Connor appreciates that the weather has turned cold enough that Markus has found himself in sweaters. It seems right. But the sketchbook and pencil case look as out of place as Markus did before when he dressed in t-shirts. Too new, too crisp, too clean.

“You draw?” Connor asks, not quite wanting to answer Markus’ question.

“A little,” Markus says. “That’s not what we’re supposed to be talking about today, though.”

“Right,” he sighs. “What was your question again?”

Markus tilts his head, narrows his eyes at Connor, “What do you think your progress has been like so far?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

Connor bites his lip, unsure of how to answer.

The truth? A lie? Which is which? What is he feeling? Is he feeling?

“I… have considered that I may have desires,” Connor says, the words coming out slowly, overly drawn out. The way he says it feels so wrong, so against the way he normally speaks. Flat tone, even words. Get them out an acceptable human pace, anything else is an inflection that could be read too much into.

“Desires?”

Connor’s eyes look from the sketch book to Markus’ face, remembers kissing him on New Years.

That was only a week ago. They haven’t seen each other since. He knows Markus has made his own theories as to why Connor kissed him. Two possible outcomes:

One, that Connor did it because he thought it was necessary to keep up with the image of their relationship.

Two, that Connor wanted to. That he meant it.

If Connor were to be entirely honest with himself—he’d say it was both. There is too much of a risk that someone wouldn’t be looking their way and—

Markus is very attractive. He is very kind. He is selfless while Connor is—

Selfish?

“I don’t know,” Connor says finally. “I feel that I might want something.”

“But you don’t know the specifics?”

_Like a craving._

“No.”

“Anything else?”

Connor closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at Markus’ face, the curiosity there, the way he holds Connor’s gaze so steadily, trying to make out every flicker of movement in his features that Connor is trying to do with his. He’s heard once that eyes are the windows to the soul. Maybe if he looks away, keeps his eyes squeezed shut, keeps Markus from staring at him, he won’t realize that Connor doesn’t have a soul.

Or that he does.

Connor isn’t sure which would be worse. For either of them.

“I did not feel happy when we went ice skating,” he says. “I did not have fun when we had our snowball fight.”

He pauses, feels the bite of a smile in the back of his head even though what he’s saying it completely the opposite. Markus has been taking him out on dates. Something about _that_ makes him want to smile.

“I don’t—I don’t know _peace,_ Markus.”

“No progress then.”

“I think perhaps you need to switch gears,” Connor says, setting his hands on the edge of the table, pushing a stack of books so that it rests more safely in the center. “We both know violence is the way to get an android to deviate.”

“You want me to attack you?”

“No,” Connor says. “But terrible things are always the beginning to deviation.”

For a moment, Connor wonders how bad rA9’s life must have been if they truly were the first to awaken. Was it just one insult? One shove? Was it something so absolutely awful that it is unspeakable? Is that why they have not shown their face?

“I have an idea, then.”

 

 

The next morning Markus knocks on his door and Connor follows him outside too early for even the sun to think of rising. The sidewalk is still covered in snow, too thick for them to see the cement but packed down by other people’s footprints. Their own are added, little paths close together.

North waits for them at the end of the street, casts Connor a glare as he climbs into the back seat behind Markus, feels safer on his side than hers even though she would likely be able to cause more damage this way. There’s something about having Markus in front of him, almost like a shield, that makes him feel better.

They drive to the warehouse in almost complete silence, only occasionally broken up by Markus trying to converse about things relating to the androids and running the city. North shuts him down every time, never wants to say more than two words. Like she’s afraid Connor will overhear and use this information for evil.

He can’t blame her. He might. He has no clue what CyberLife will want at the end of all this. His meetings with Amanda have stopped but the missions still come, just as heavy and strong and necessary as they were before.

When they finally arrive, Markus leads Connor away from the main building, heads into a small office off to the side.

“What are we doing here?” he asks, following him into the middle of the room.

“I—It’s hard to explain,” Markus replies. “Just wait here. I have to go talk to someone.”

“Markus—”

But Markus is already gone, brushing past his shoulder and closing the door behind him. Connor doesn’t try to open the door. He heard the lock click into place. He’s been imprisoned here even though it isn’t as if he would leave without Markus anyways.

 

 

“I need your assistance,” Markus says, leaning against the edge of North’s desk. “You said you would help me. No matter what.”

“Not with this,” she says, barely glancing up at him.

“You helped me take apart his body and hide it all over this place,” he says. “But you won’t help me now?”

“You’re asking me to do your dirty work for you,” she says. “You want _me_ to provoke _him_ so _you_ don’t have to feel guilty about it.”

“I thought you would enjoy an opportunity to chew him out.”

“Of course I would,” she snaps, looking up at him. “But it’s different, Markus. You’re asking me to do this because you feel too bad about doing it yourself. You don’t want to damage a relationship that has no future. Just accept that he’s a machine. He was designed to hunt deviants. He doesn’t have the same mind as us—he can’t deviate.”

“He can.”

North’s jaw clenches, her eyes look away from Markus to the piles of paperwork in front of her.

“You never even told me why you killed him in the first place. You never even told me he was back. I heard from _Simon_ and I didn’t even believe him. You know how shitty I felt telling him that he was delusional?”

“North—”

“You could have called. You could have said he was back. I thought you were joking when you said you might kill him again.”

“I was.”

She rolls her eyes, collapses backwards against her chair. “This is fucked, Markus.”

“I’ll tell you everything—”

“So that I have a hundred more secrets to keep from Josh and Simon?” she asks. “No. I’d rather not.”

Markus falls silent, doesn’t know what to say that will convince North otherwise. He can’t come up with anything that would bribe her into this. Because she’s right.

He asked Simon for help because Simon is the happiest person he knows. He asked Josh for help because he is at the most peace with all of this.

He’s asking North now because she is the angriest person he’s ever met. She is volatile. She is flames. She might not be an expert at controlling it, but she knows how to shape it into a weapon. She knows how to make it hurt the most.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a long moment. “I shouldn’t have—”

“No, you shouldn’t have. Leave it at that, Markus. Don’t try and come up with excuses.”

Markus steps away from the desk, walks towards the door. He casts her one last look as if she will suddenly change her mind because deep down he wants her to. Markus does not want to be the one that screams at Connor for hours on end, trying to get him to feel something.

There are a thousand things that Connor has done that he hates. There are a hundred things that he could say. There are dozens of profanities that he could string together in the hopes of getting Connor to react somehow.

And he knows there is a fracture there already. He saw Connor go over to Chloe. He saw him apologize to her even though it was entirely unnecessary. Connor feels guilty. He just needs to exploit that.

Somehow that means Markus cannot be the one to do it.

“Markus,” she says, looking up, meeting his eyes. “You’re making a mistake.”

“By trying to help him?”

“No,” she says. “By falling in love with him.”

He winces, his grip on the knob tightening.

No. He is not falling in love with Connor. She’s wrong. He could never.

“I don’t—” he starts, has to pause, draw himself back together again, figure out the correct words, force them one after the other. “I don’t have to be in love with him to want to help him.”

“Of course not,” she says. “But I know you.”

“North—”

“Listen,” she says, standing, a heavy sigh escaping her. “I don’t want to help you. I don’t want you to use me so you can feel better. But… if you’re right—if there is something _worthy_ about him…”

It is so hard for her to say the words, they physically pain her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t ruin things by being the one.”

“You’re going to help me?”

“I’m going to get rid of some of my thoughts in a cruel verbal manner,” she says, a small smile on her lips which dissipates quickly. “But, Markus, you have to know that eventually you might be forced to do something to make him deviate. Something you aren’t going to like.”

He considers this, shoves the thought away.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe he is only pushing off the inevitable.

But at least it is one more thing that won’t add up against their relationship in the end if he succeeds.

If he _wants_ a relationship in the end.

Is he just chasing the fake Connor that was carefully crafted to match his every desire?

 

 

Markus doesn’t want to eavesdrop. He doesn’t want to listen in on them, but still he lingers by the door, makes out the sound of North screaming at Connor. Over and over and over.

“Do you care at all how many of us you killed?”

He can’t see Connor’s face, can’t hear him reply. He could be sitting completely calm, face completely blank, starring at North without a trace of guilt. Or, he could be fighting back words, on the verge of tears that will spill if he tries to tell her that he does.

He wishes he could see through the walls so that he could decipher what Connor is feeling, see it all written out on his face.

But he is also content that he’s on the other side, that he can’t see. He can pretend that maybe Connor isn’t replying because everything is shown in his eyes, his body language. If he saw Connor now, if he were to see no reaction to any of this, it would make things worse.

And he can’t take that risk.

 

 

She is strange.

Connor remembers her from before. Better than Simon. Simon is a blur in his past, almost entirely missing. The gaps were filled in, only slightly, when they had spent that hour circling the rink together. Little fragments filling in the missing frames.

North is different. He remembers her. He remembers them being on the boat together, her looking over to him with suspicion but complete trust because Markus trusted him and that was enough.

It has shifted now. They aren’t in the middle of a battle. They are living day to day lives. Their actions now have drastically different consequences but seemingly weigh an equal amount.

She hates him.

Connor doesn’t like it. Some part of him wants her to like him. Some part of him wants them to be friends. He wishes, more than anything, in that moment that they could have different lives. That she could stay up late with him, whispering about their crushes. An android she rescued along the way.

And him?

Oh, he supposes it must be Markus. If things were different—it would have to be.

Connor wonders if he can repair this damage. If Markus fails at teaching him emotion, it won’t matter. But if he succeeds, if Connor becomes a deviant, is it possible to fix this?

“Do you care at all how many of us you killed?”

North does not know the number. Connor doubts even Markus knows the number.

But one is more than enough. She knows that he has the blood of at least one android on his hands. She does not know how many, but one is plenty enough for hate to be created.

He can’t reply to her because everything is stuck inside of him. Something surges in his chest only to be yanked away and replaced by numbness. Different from when he felt the urge to apologize to Chloe. Different from when had to stop himself from smiling when he was with Markus (which time? Any of the times. Any of the numerous times he has looked over at Markus and thought _Oh._ )

Something is pulling it all back, swallowing whatever he is supposed to be feeling right now whole.

He is almost grateful for it, if it weren’t for the fact that the focus of this push and pull, this yo-yo of feeling and unfeeling, if not for the fact it only makes North angrier.

She doesn’t touch him. He can see how much she wants to. She wants to toss him against the wall. She wants to punch him in the face. She passes by a shelf of boxes in her pacing and her hands twitch, want to grab the boxes and heave them violently his way.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asks, her voice suddenly quiet, her face twisted into disgust. “Why are you doing this to him?”

“Who?” he asks, knows the answer before she even says it.

_“Markus.”_

Because he doesn’t have a choice. Because he feels a bond between him and Markus. Because CyberLife is telling him to. Because he likes the thing that blossoms in his chest when he sees Markus smile.

He opts for the most basic truth he can. The one that he can say without any strings attached. The one that will not be the answer she wants, but the answer she needs.

“I have a mission.”

“Fuck your fucking mission,” she says, her hand coming up to his shoulder, shoving him back only a few inches and only because he is caught off guard by the action. She had little strength in it, pulled back at the last second.

Is she growing soft?

“He’s a person. He’s a living being. He feels things and you’re manipulating him for fun.”

“Not for fun.”

She stops, stares at him for a long time with narrowed eyes.

“Right. I forgot. You don’t feel anything. You’re just a machine that doesn’t give a fuck,” she says. “Someone could have a gun to his head and you wouldn’t care. What if I brought him in here right now? What if I tried to kill him? Would you even fight to save his life?”

“No,” he says, the words coming out more quickly than he means to, unable to realize how terrible they sound until they are being formed. “I wouldn’t.”

“Because you’re a machine.”

“No,” he says again, more firmly this time. “Because I don’t think you would do it. It wouldn’t prove anything. You would never kill him. Not in a hundred years.”

But he thought the same thing when Markus held the gun to his own head.

He never thought Markus would kill him. And he did.

Emotions are unpredictable. Try as he might, as accurate as he may be, he is not a fortune teller.

“If you care about him at all,” North replies. “You’d leave him alone.”

“I can’t. I have a mission.”

“Fuck,” she says, turning away, sighing heavily. One of her hands is clenched at her side, the other on her forehead. “You can’t even—You can’t even play at being a good person because you have a stupid mission you can’t contradict.”

“Correct.”

“Would you leave him?” she asks, turning back to face him. Her eyes are tired, she is exhausted. “If your mission allowed you to, would you leave him?”

“Yes.”

She looks as surprised as he does. He hadn’t meant to say that.

“Fuck,” she says again, and then she storms out of the room.

She reminds him of Gavin. Two sides of the same coin. They both hate the other species, but if it wasn’t a contributing factor, they’d be a deathly duo.

 

 

“It didn’t work,” Connor says. “North has been learning to control her anger. She was not nearly as vicious or furious as you intended her to be. The bomb was not quite ready to be detonated.”

“Don’t call her a bomb.”

Connor looks over at him, tilting his head, “Why not?”

“Because she’s a living being, and her anger is justified.”

“Maybe so. But we both failed your lesson. She wasn’t angry enough to provoke me. I didn’t feel anything.”

“You’re lying,” he says. “You felt something.”

“And what exactly was that?”

Markus is quiet for a moment, glancing over at him in the dark of the hallway.

“You said you’d leave me alone if you could.”

“That isn’t a feeling—”

“It’s the start of one, don’t you think?”

Connor sighs, leans more heavily against the wall. He doesn’t like the end of their nights together, they are always awkward, both always aware of how much they’ve failed. But this is worse. Every other time it has been a simple goodbye when they part ways for different elevators. But this time Markus followed him to his apartment, felt the need to carry on a conversation that Connor doesn’t want to have.

He wants to lay down. He wants to close his eyes. He wants to shut down for a few hours so that whatever part of his code that repairs damage can get to work—if it even exists. He doesn’t like these traces of feelings. They are so faint and yet they are so heavy.

“When you kissed me on New Years, that was more than just trying to blend in, wasn’t it?” he asks.

“There could have been anyone that managed to sneak a glance our way, I was covering my bases.”

“What about before that?” he asks. “With Chloe?”

“I thought—” he stops. “I might have felt a flicker of doubt. About killing her twin.”

Markus tenses the slightest bit. Neither of them have spoken about this. About Connor killing an android, but he knows Markus saw it. A split second hidden amongst all the other images that tumbled out of him.

“I mean after that. When you kissed me,” Markus says, brushing the skin underneath Connor’s eye with his thumb. A gentle movement that makes Connor tense. “Here.”

“Do you want the truth?”

Markus steps a little closer to him and Connor wishes he could melt into the wall.

“Yes.”

_The truth._

“I was thinking about you.”

One last step forward.

“What… what happened to you.”

Markus leans in a little farther.

Connor should shut up now, should let Markus kiss him because it is information that CyberLife would want. He should come up with a lie. Say how much he admired Markus for fighting his way out of whatever had happened to him, working his way to the top.

But instead he says the truth.

Like Markus wants.

“I was thinking about how you could have killed an android, too,” he says. “When you replaced your parts after being destroyed in your own home.”

Markus stops, their lips only inches apart.

Connor reaches up, presses his hand flat against Markus’ chest.

“I saw the report. I know what happened to you.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he says. “I don’t know how you think I would.”

“No,” Connor says, wants to shove him away. “But you _could_ have. I’ve been to those dumps before, Markus. I’ve seen the androids. Some of them are still functioning. You could have torn a Thirium regulator out of their chest. No one would ever know.”

Connor’s fingers leave the fabric of his shirt and Markus shifts away from him a fraction more.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I know,” he says. “But wouldn’t it be easier to believe you did?”

“Why?” Markus says, pulling back further.

“We would match.”

“ _Match?_ ” he hisses. “What does that mean?”

“We’d both be killers.”

Markus steps back, pushes away from the wall.

“You wish I killed someone so that we would _match?”_ he asks. “So you can feel less guilty about what you’ve done?”

Connor breathes in, hopes Markus doesn’t notice how shaky it is or how much his voice is trembling, “I think you should consider that you are failing at this, Markus.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Markus asks. “That’s not what we’re talking about here—”

“It is,” Connor says. “I’m a killer. I’ve killed nine androids. It doesn’t matter if I have feelings or not. You’re never going to be able to look past that. I thought—I thought if we matched you would understand but it’s different, isn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You are never going to be able to forget or forgive what I have done,” he says, makes sure his face is as emotionless as possible, his voice as even as he can get it. “And I am never going to be able to love you because you are failing to teach me anything.”

“Connor—”

“I will never love you,” he continues. “And you will never love me.”

He sees the tears in Markus’ eyes, the way his fists clench at his sides.

“You’re right,” he says. “But I’m still going to try.”

As he watches Markus turn away, disappear down the turn of the hallway, he lets out a long sigh, feels the thing in the back of his head clawing more viciously this time. He wishes it would get free already. Whatever it is, maybe it will make this pain useful.

 

 

TERROR

“Follow me.”

No _hello,_ no _good morning_ , nothing. Not a single word or attempt to glide them into the day. Markus is just walking, coat over his shoulders, his own hat pulled down low on his head as he barrels up the stairs, doesn’t even bother taking the elevator.

Connor knows where they are going the second Markus’ foot goes _up_ instead of _down._

The rooftop.

He feels the claw marks a little more painfully this time. It is not the same as it was last week when they last saw each other. It is not the feeling of the creature making new gouges, of forcing the opening in the code wider. He feels the physical pain of the gaps it has left behind like they are fresh.

His feet feel like lead as he follows Markus up, his skin feels like it is being set on fire as he steps out into the frigid air.

He does not want to be here.

Markus turns around to face him, his hand reaching up to rest on Connor’s cheek for such a tiny millisecond that Connor wonders if the touch was meant on purpose.

And then his hat is ripped from his head, tossed to the side.

“Yellow,” Markus says, fingers touching the LED on the side of his head. “Why?”

He doesn’t know.

“Why are we up here?” Connor asks instead.

Constantly asking this.

Why are they wherever they are? Why won’t Markus ever answer him? Why is he trailing him along like he is proposing a riddle?

Markus steps backwards, hand drifting to his side.

“Come here.”

Connor sighs, takes a hesitant step forward.

He is yards from the edges, but he feels like he is about to tumble over completely.

“Closer.”

Connor keeps his eyes locked on Markus, pretends they are somewhere else as he takes another step forward.

Markus takes one back.

“Markus—”

“Come to me,” he says, a hand held out in the space between them. “I won’t let you fall.”

_I don’t believe you._

“You’re trying to scare me.”

“No,” Markus says, shaking his head. There are too many thoughts running through Connor’s head to focus on the little movements of his face, to figure out what he’s feeling in this moment, if he’s lying or telling the truth. “I’m trying to help you.”

“And if I don’t step forward?”

“I’m not going to force you.”

_I don’t believe you._

“Connor, you’re not going to die. Trust me.”

_Trust. Trust. Trust._

The pain in his head is growing, it is filling him up. It is breaking lines of code, it is consuming him, it is everything and nothing.

He doesn’t know what it is—he wants to focus his thoughts on something else. He regrets ever wanting to know what the beast was because now it physically aches so much he feels ready to collapse.

And he is aware of how foolish this all is. How he shouldn’t feel pain. How he shouldn’t be feeling any of this.

“Connor. One more step.”

He blinks, didn’t realize he had taken so many from the door. They are so close to the edge. They are dangerously close to the edge. He feels like he is one step from slipping over, of tumbling downwards.

He can picture Daniel’s face in his mind.

Or he can picture Simon’s.

He can’t tell the difference. They are blurring together. They are the same person but they are separate. Two different souls. Different bodies.

_Androids don’t have souls._

**Focus.**

One more step forward.

And he reaches out, grasps Markus’ hand tightly, barely close enough to grab his fingers. Markus pulls on tight, yanks him forward with such force that he stumbles, collapses against his chest. His lungs are heaving, his head is spinning.

“What—”

Markus is turning him quickly though and he feels the short, concrete fence, the only barrier between here and the ground, pressed against the back of his legs.

“You’re scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Your LED is red.”

“It’s—” he can’t even come up with an excuse that would make sense.

It’s the pain in him—he knows that. It’s the pain ripping through his skull, it’s the feeling of the monster clawing its way out of its cage.

He can’t explain that to Markus. He wouldn’t understand.

“Just admit it,” Markus says. “Admit you’re afraid and I won’t push you over.”

Connor’s hands wrap into the fabric of his sweater.

“You’ll come down with me.”

“No,” he says. “I won’t. I’ll catch myself before I go over.”

Connor doesn’t argue this because his brain is too muddled, swimming into too much confusion and agony to survey the area and see if it’s the truth.

“I’m _not_ scared,” he whispers. “I’m not.”

“Fine,” he says, pushing Connor a little harder against the wall. The roof is slippery, the snow melted and reformed into patches of ice. He feels his feet slip across the surface, feels his heart thundering in his chest. “I guess you’re going to die then.”

“You can’t kill me,” he says, trying to grasp onto something, anything that will ground him in this moment, but it makes things worse. “I’m not alive.”

“No, you aren’t,” Markus replies. “Another Connor is just going to replace you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And they’ll try this again? Manipulating me into trying to help you?”

“Yes.”

“So why should I give a shit if I push you over?”

“You think I have a soul worth saving.”

“No, I don’t,” his voice is low, there is a tremble to it. “You proved that to me last week. You killed nine androids. You don’t care at all about them. You feel no guilt. You will never be capable of feeling anything. You don’t have a soul.”

_A soul. A soul. A soul._

“But—”

“All you have to do, Connor, is admit you feel something. Right now. In this moment.”

_He can’t._

“I don’t feel—”

“Your voice is shaking.”

_It is._

“You’re crying.”

_He is._

“Why would you do that if you don’t feel anything?”

_He_

_Doesn’t_

_Know._

“Connor.”

The creature is making its path through his brain, barreling through everything. He is sobbing and he can’t stop. He can feel a scream wanting to rip its way through his throat and he swallows it as best as he can, manages only a strained groan.

“You c-can’t kill me,” he repeats. “I’m not alive.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The movement is so sudden that Connor can’t even understand what is happening at first. He is yanked violently, his eyes wide as the world blurs around him. When he hits the ground, he is breathing so heavily, his thoughts so twisted and lost, he cannot make out any thought but one:

What does a soul look like?

What does a soul feel like?

Does it feel like fear?

Does it look like a monster?

He rests his head against the cold ground of the rooftop, watches as Markus walks away.

Not thrown over the edge.

His heart thunders, trying to reconcile this with whatever has occurred.

Just thrown to the side.

 

 

DEVASTATION

It is all he can feel.

Fear.

He knows of nothing else. Only this:

He locked it away.

As best as he could.

His _soul._

He has carried it with him, sealed in a cage as far back in his mind as he could manage.

The soul is not in a body. It does not remain trapped in plastic. It carries on over with memories. Maybe it gets a little splintered each time, but it still journeys along, it still tries to keep going.

The soul is in the mind.

Connor’s hands tremble, violent spasms that he cannot control. He bites on balled up shirts to muffle his screams, he buries his face into a pillow to keep the wails quiet. He is sure the people on either side of him can hear anyways.

This is what Markus has done to him.

He has fractured his coding.

Not quite machine.

But not a deviant.

 

 

How do you kill a machine?

Easy.

It is just a machine. Pull the trigger. Drive in the knife. Twist the neck. Shove them over the cliff.

Why couldn’t he do it?

Why couldn’t he manage it?

_Because North was right._

The question is not how to kill a machine.

It is how could it be possible that Markus could fall in love with one.

 

 

ABANDONEMENT

Connor is crying when he shows up on his doorstep. His face is streaked with tears and he steps in before Markus can say anything, barges past him and starts ransacking the apartment. Shoving things off of tables, opening the drawers in the kitchen and dumping their contents on the ground.

“What are you doing?” he asks, his voice caught between anger and fear.

“Where is it?” Connor asks.

“Where is what?”

“The gun,” he says, leaving the kitchen quickly for the bedroom.

Markus chases after him, is not quicker than Connor is.

“Connor—”

He watches as the drawer of his nightstand is pulled violently from it’s place, scatters papers and junk across on the ground, breaks into two pieces. When Markus looks back up at Connor, the gun is in his hands, resting on the surface of his palms as he stares down at it.

“Why did you do that?” Connor asks before Markus can say anything. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

“Connor,” he says, stepping slowly forward. “What are you doing?”

“You’re ruining me,” he whispers. “I was perfect. I was everything they wanted. I made one bad mistake. I made one stupid choice. It fit the mission, so they let me, but—I should have killed you. Every chance I got I should have killed you.”

“Give me the gun, Connor.”

Connor looks up at him suddenly, the LED on his side blinking furious red. Like the blood of humans. Like a robin’s feathers.

“I lied to you,” he says, moving the gun to one hand, holding it loosely as the other comes up to wipe away his years. “I told you—I told you that we were all different people. And it’s partially true. I’m—Death changes you. It changes you every time you experience it. I’m not the same person I was when Hank killed me. I’m not—I’m not the same person I was when…”

“When what?”

“When Daniel almost killed that little girl.”

“What are you saying, Connor?” he asks, taking one small step forward.

“I’m not the same person but I have the same soul,” he says, his hand moving to his chest, laying flat where the Thirium pump would be—where his _heart_ would be. “You—you believe in souls, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you think I have one?” he asks. “You said you didn’t on the rooftop but you didn’t kill me, either. You should have killed me. So—you must have been lying. You must have believed what I said, right? That I have a soul.”

“Yes,” Markus says quietly. “Connor, please give me the gun.”

“Why?” he asks, taking a step backwards. “You think I’m going to kill you?”

_No._

“It’s safer—”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

Connor steps forward, holds it out towards him gently. It is the way he hands it off to Markus that he realizes what is happening.

Connor is afraid of it.

The same way he’s afraid of the rooftop. Not to such an extreme—the rooftop was the first death he ever experienced, but—

“Do you know how many times I’ve been shot in the head?” Connor whispers. “Three times. An android. Hank. _You_.”

Markus wants to set the gun down, doesn’t want it in his hands, but he holds onto it. He can’t let Connor get it back.

“You—you _ruined_ me,” he repeats, cycling back to this again.

“By making you feel something?”

“Yes,” Connor hisses, his voice turning angry. “And I know—I know how much you hate me. I know how ashamed you feel—why don’t you just kill me? If you hate me so much, why didn’t you just kill me the second you saw me?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“I don’t _believe_ you.”

“Connor—”

“Kill me, Markus,” he says, reaching forward, pulling Markus’ hand so that even in his loose grip the gun is aimed at his head. “Kill me. I’ll come back and you can kill me again and again and again. Maybe you can call North over. You can have her get some anger out, too.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Why?”

“Because—” Markus says, forcing himself to stop. He doesn’t know how to play this situation. He doesn’t know how to fix it. He doesn’t know how to repair whatever he has broken. “You’re not alive.”

Connor’s lips twitch into the smallest of smiles.

“Then destroy me.”

And so Markus does.

 

 

The gun falls to the floor.

Markus steps forward, holds Connor’s face gently in his hands, presses a soft kiss against his lips.

Connor can barely kiss him back with how much he is crying, but he tries. He tries his absolute hardest.

It is not the same as the kiss at the ice skating rink. It is not the same one like on New Years.

This is not gentle in the way of keeping it short, sweet, just for show.

This is gentle but destructive.

Connor pulls away, stumbles backwards. Markus catches him around the waist, holds him in place, leans their foreheads against each other.

“I didn’t kill you because I love you.”

He closes his eyes in an effort not to see it.

The switch of his mission from _Befriend Markus,_ from _Get Close to Markus,_ to this.

But he sees it anyways, can feel the press of it against his mind as he clings to Markus. He doesn’t have a choice. He never has a choice. He has to do it. He has to kill Markus.

 

 

Connor pulls away from his arms slowly. His movements are careful as he picks up the gun, holds it in the same way he did before. Flat in his palms, starring at it like the weapon it is.

“Connor?” he asks.

He has said his name so many times in these last few minutes. He will say it a thousand times more if it helps in some way.

“You should have gotten rid of this,” he whispers, taking a step away from Markus, past the wreckage of the drawer. “You shouldn’t have kept it.”

“What are you talking about?”

Connor sighs, turns the gun over in his hand, his grip moving from lost, of not wanting to touch the metal—

To pointing it at him.

“Connor—”

 

 

“You are no longer necessary,” he says. “CyberLife has all the information they need.”

An android is capable of falling in love.

An android is capable of falling in love with a _machine._

A deviant leader is capable of falling in love with the android designed to hunt them down.

Enough data to dissect and try and understand for centuries.

“You’re going to kill me?” Markus asks, his voice filled to the brim with something Connor doesn’t want to decipher, doesn’t want to understand.

He is aware that he is still crying. They are not the body wracking sobs they were before, but there are still tears streaming down his cheeks, leaving calm trails on his skin.

Connor tries to find comfort in the way a gun feels in his hand.

He has been surrounded by guns since the day he was activated. At the apartment with Daniel and Emma. With Hank, who always carried one on his person. At crime scenes, guarded with officers ready to shoot. He doesn’t remember a time that he has gone more than a few hours without one in his presence.

Until Markus.

Until these last few weeks.

“I have to,” Connor says quietly.

“You don’t,” Markus says, stepping forward and Connor brings up the gun, tenses his arm. Markus freezes in his spot. “You have a choice, Connor.”

“No, I don’t,” he says. “I never have a choice.”

“You do,” Markus replies. “You chose—”

“I didn’t choose anything that wouldn’t have benefited my mission, and, in the end, that isn’t a choice at all, is it?”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you believe that, either.”

He feels his finger tremble on the trigger.

He should pull it. He should get this over with now. He should not drag this out.

“I am just a machine.”

“A machine that _feels_ something,” he replies. “You were crying. You were screaming. You felt fear. You felt anger. You wanted to die.”

“No—”

“Why did you want to die? Why did you want me to kill you?”

Because it would reset this. It would right his coding. It would be back to numbness, it would be back to nothingness.

Which is in improvement on this. His soul is too heavy to carry. He is too weak for this. He is terrified of what would happen if he broke that wall down, if he felt everything as strongly as a deviant would.

That is terror. That is devastation.

Feeling everything as fully as they are.

They are only watered down right now and they are destroying him.

“Connor,” he says, voice low, a step forward. “You have to make a choice.”

_It’s time to decide._

Isn’t that what Markus had told him before?

In that split second before he decided to pretend he was deviant, he had a million thoughts. He knew how things would play out, he knew he would be given an opportunity to kill him.

He never took any of them.

How could he take it now?

“I—” he closes his eyes, the gun lowers just barely. “Everything—it’s—it’s all too much.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he whispers.

“I’ll help you.”

Connor opens his eyes, looks at the softness of Markus’ face, the concern etched there.

Not for his own life, but for _him._

For _Connor._

He is holding a gun on him and Markus is _concerned_ for him. Markus wasn’t lying. He really does love him.

Connor cannot, for the life of him, understand why.

“You have a soul,” Markus says, finally closing the gap between them, pushing Connor’s arm so the gun rests at his side instead of pointed at his chest. Markus presses his hand firmly against Connor’s heart, the thud of it thrumming against his palm. “You’re alive.”

 

 

The gun falls to the floor for the second time. For a moment, Markus doesn’t know what has happened. The sound of it hitting the ground is so loud, so sudden, he thinks for a moment it has gone off before realizing how different the noise would be.

“Connor?”

Another moment, another brief second. Connor is staring at him, eyes wide, LED still blinking red.

And then he turns and runs.

Markus chases after him, trips over the contents of the drawer that have spilled out. By the time he makes it to the hallway outside of his apartment, Connor is missing. He races towards the stairs, takes them as quickly as he can, bursts into Connor’s apartment first and finds it empty and then he is running towards the front door, pushing them open, stepping out into the blizzard.

“Connor?” he questions the snow, calls into the storm, screams as loud as he can.

He does not get a response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing / Editing Music;  
> All I Want - Kodaline  
> Waves (acoustic) - Dean Lewis (which was a huge inspo in writing this chapter)  
> I'll Be Good - Jaymes Young


	7. things i have seen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Of all the things I have seen and the places I have been, you were the one that felt most like home."  
> \- Obsidio / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

The snow slows him down, but it doesn’t stop him. He slips, he falls, he hits the ground a hundred times, but he never stops running. Not when he hears his name called out, desperate and pleading and broken. He cannot stop running. He isn’t even sure where he’s going—he just knows that if he stops moving, he will fall apart. His feet putting one step after the other is the only thing keeping him from breaking down.

How did this happen? How did he get here? Why did he allow it to come to this?

 

 

Markus stands in the snow for an hour trying to decide which direction he should run, if he should try and follow Connor at all. Eventually, he turns back inside, closes the door behind him tightly. It’s too cold to stay outside. He’s getting warning signs about his biocomponents freezing and all he can do is try and keep himself from crying.

Connor is getting the warnings, too. He must be. Markus just hopes he can think straight enough to find somewhere to stay.

 

 

He isn’t really sure how he ended up here, in this physical place, but it makes more sense to him than how he ended up here, in this mental state. It is something he can at least understand, even if he doesn’t remember heading this specific direction.

Connor steps into the precinct, dusting the snow off his shoulders, regretting that he doesn’t have a coat to keep some of the chill off his body. It’s better in here, but he’s still freezing.

He’s never been frozen before. He’s never been cold before. He’s understood the temperature, acted accordingly, but he has never _felt_ the bite of cold air on his skin, the sting on his cheeks. He wants to put it back in its box, lock it away forever. He doesn’t need this. It is unnecessary.

The DPD is the same way it was before he left, except that the glass walls of Fowler’s office have been cracked. It lays in piles of clear crystals like a salt line to keep demons away. It’s the only thing different from before. An unsettling display of destruction that makes Connor want to turn and leave.

He steps over to the row of androids against the wall, his hands trembling as he tucks them away in his pockets to try and still them. If someone broke the glass, if it was a person instead of a freak accident, none of them cared about the androids here.

Or, maybe, they were like Connor. Maybe they were a machine playing at having a soul for someone else’s benefit.

He reaches his hand out, touches the skin of the android closest to him, feels the lifelessness there and pulls back violently, staggering backwards and hitting the edge of a desk hard enough that pain blossoms up his side.

Dead. They’re dead. The Thirium in their bodies is no longer working, their biocomponents have shut down. Maybe if their parts were replaced they would come back online but—

Death. Nothingness. That’s all he felt. That’s all that’s left. Just plastic against his fingertips.

Connor cannot stay here. He isn’t sure why he came here besides for the comfort of his previous life, when things felt _right._

But he cannot stay here. Not with the broken glass. Not with the bugs and the mold in the abandoned food and coffee mugs. Not with four dead androids staring back at him.

He heads to the door, pushes it open, runs again.

 

 

“I’m sorry,” Markus says, leaning against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest. “About everything.”

“I know.”

“Can you—can you please come over here?” he asks. “I—I don’t want to be alone.”

A sigh.

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

 

 

Connor reaches up, knocks on the door slowly, testing the emptiness of the place before retrieving the key from its spot on the top of the door frame and pushing it open.

“Anyone here?” he calls, his voice is hoarse, barely audible. He has to try three times to get it to echo around the room like he wants it to, but by then he already knows the answer.

Gavin’s apartment looks no different than how it did when he last left it with a small box of things in his arms and a backpack full of clothes. Clean, organized, with a thick layer of dust covering every surface.

He locks the door behind him, steps into the living room, runs his hand along the surface of a shelf. Last time he was here, he had cleaned the entire place from top to bottom for something to do. The urge to do it again, to create a list of things that need to be done to get the place to look nice, is hard to resist.

Connor settles for sleeping instead. He needs to close his eyes, he needs to curl up into himself and shut down for a while. He needs a break.

The bedroom towards the back of the apartment is small, taken up mostly with the large bed. He draws back the covers, tosses them to the side and finds a new blanket in the closet sealed in a plastic bag. Blue instead of green, but older, thinner. It will do little to help protect from the chill seeping in through the windows but it won’t be covered with dirt and grime from being left to the elements of a decaying building.

This apartment complex was one the many that the androids didn’t come near. So many of them wanted houses they could cluster into as groups, families or friends. Maybe the lonelier androids opted for the apartments. The need to be by others without the obligation of speaking to them every day, but the option if they cared for it.

He lays the blanket down over the bed, strips off the pillow cases and tosses them to floor, not that the dust really would bother him, just that he doesn’t want it near him. He changes his clothes to get out of the ones that are growing wet each second the snow on them starts to melt.

When he finally climbs in bed, his body has reached its limit. It’s no longer able to hold back everything. The floodgates are open and he can’t stop crying, can’t stop shaking. He wants to scream but the possibility of someone hearing him is too great so he swallows it, his throat aching.

All he wants is to go back three days before, when he felt—

Not nothing. Because he knows he felt _something_. But they were so small, they were fragile little things that fluttered in his chest, stopped his feet, made his hands itch. He could hold them back, he could shove them away.

This is too much. The blood in his veins has turned to liquid sadness. If he cut himself open, he would bleed tears.

He wants to be numb again. He wants to be a machine again.

 

 

It’s another three hours before he hears a knock on his door.

Markus stands, even though it’s already opening by the time he reaches the hallway and North is stepping in, muttering something about the cold and shutting the door behind her with a look on her face that tells him she wants to slam it but doesn’t out of respect for the neighbors.

But, when she sees his face, it disappears.

“What happened?” she asks, setting her keys down on the table as she steps over to him, surveys the wreckage of the kitchen floor.

“Connor.”

North pauses, chewing on her bottom lip for a moment before saying, “I’ll kill him.”

“Don’t,” he says, because he’s sure whatever happens to Connor now, he isn’t coming back. Even if his consciousness was reuploaded into a new body, it wouldn’t be the same.

“Fine,” she says. “Are you going to give me specifics, then?”

Markus sighs, keeps his eyes away from the mess in the kitchen and instead focuses on how much of the jagged edge of her keys he can see from here.

“Listen, you don’t have to,” she says after a long moment. “But sometimes it helps. Isn’t that what you told me?”

It’s much easier to be on the other side of the conversation in situations like these. It’s much easier to be the one saying how better it is to _talk_ instead of bottling up emotions. It’s much more difficult to be the one to find the words, form them and explain everything.

Sometimes things seem so trivial once he has to speak them out loud.

“He…” Markus trails off, realizes how little he wants to say the words.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, quickly. “We can watch a movie instead. You have _My Life as a Zucchini_ , right? I’ve never seen it and you’re always talking about how much I’d love it.”

“Right,” he whispers, gives her a small, very miserable but genuine, smile.

 

 

Connor spends a week cleaning Gavin’s apartment. It takes him longer than it should. He keeps stopping because his hands are shaking too badly to do anything properly or because he suddenly starts crying and can’t make himself stop.

And constantly his thoughts run back to Markus.

Or, rather, running _away_ from Markus.

He knows he ran because he was scared, he knows he ran because felt terrible about the fact he tried to kill Markus, _again._

But every time he thinks of his face, of that one blue eye, he is reminded of all the android lives he’s taken, all the bodies and souls he’s destroyed. No amount of reassurance that they were missions, that he was a machine, will make up for that.

He killed a little girl. He killed two women just trying to run away from abusers. He caused two people to kill themselves. He couldn’t have done much worse with his life.

Markus was an idiot for thinking he was loveable. Connor is nothing but a ruin of coding. The ones and zeroes in his system spell out murder. No amount of things he does in the future will make up for that.

 

 

North doesn’t move in with him, but he can tell she wants to. She has turned into a protective shield, not letting him be alone for more than a few hours at a time. When she’s working at the warehouse, Simon or Josh arrive at the apartment ready to fill his day with distractions.

Part of him is grateful. It’s easier to watch a movie or read a book or do _something_ that will keep his thoughts occupied with fictional problems. How will they save the world? Why are their powers tied together? Who will she choose, when both of them are her soulmates?

Other times, he wishes he would be allowed to feel things. Sometimes they boil over the edge, unable to kept in check, and he is crying and unable to stop.

He just wishes he knew if Connor was alive and why he left.

Maybe then he could heal.

_Closure._ That’s all he desires now.

Or, rather, all he will allow himself to desire if he believes Connor will never return back to him the same way again.

 

 

The one thing that’s nice about the apartment, even after it is clean, even after he is left with nothing to do but flip through battered horror novels, is that Markus will never know he’s here. He will never find Connor here like he might at the DPD or Hank’s house. This is the one place where he feels isolated from the city.

If he lays down at night, pulls the covers up over him, he can pretend the world outside of him doesn’t exist. He can pretend that he is back in that cramped space, eyes closed, no memories. He is not anything yet. He is just an unfeeling piece of plastic, ready for memories and data to be uploaded into his brain.

There, he can pretend he has done nothing wrong. Hours of silence, hours of playing pretend. It only ever hurts more when he finally breaks it.

Connor wants to go back to Markus. He wants to knock on his door, he wants to fall into his arms, he wants to kiss him, he wants to tell him that he doesn’t know if he’s lovable, doesn’t know if he loves Markus, but he knows he is capable of loving someone.

Or, maybe he does love Markus. Maybe it would hurt less if he didn’t. He wishes Markus had taught him that instead. Somewhere in the lessons, he wishes Markus had been able to put love into concise words, tell him what it was, how it felt, how he was supposed to deal with it.

Instead, Connor is just a tangled mess of feelings he cannot name or doesn’t _want_ to name.

 

 

It’s at exactly three in the morning when he gets a knock on his door. Markus extricates himself from the couch limb by limb, careful not to disturb Simon’s sleep as he pads over to the door quickly, quietly. His movements are muffled only by the sound of the television playing through the credits of a show.

He expects it’s North, ready to awaken Simon and take his spot on the Markus Watch. They don’t have a strict schedule, not one that Markus has been able to predict, but he knows North wants to be here as much as she can. Like she doesn’t trust Simon or Josh to keep an eye on him properly. Maybe it’s because she knows he’s killed someone, that she helped hide the body. It’s a different bond.

It’s a little ridiculous—their watching him—considering what they think has happened, though. Him and Connor broke up after a few months of dating—it’s not that big of a deal. They don’t know how it happened, they don’t know how long they were together before. Markus kept Connor secret from them in fear of how they would react.

Connor, after all, was the one that was hunting them down. He was the one that brought the army to Jericho and killed so many of their people. They dealt with it better than he thought—but that doesn’t change the fact he always expected them to be silently judging him and his choices.

Markus opens the door quietly, leaning against the wall as he peers out into the hallway.

Not North.

“Connor?”

He has to fight himself to keep from walking into the hallway, to pulling Connor close or maybe shoving him and telling him off for how worried he was.

“Is this a bad time?” Connor asks.

_Is this a bad time?_ It makes him want to laugh.

“No,” he says, then, with a look over his shoulder. “Actually, yeah. I guess it is.”

“I’ll come back later, then,” Connor says, and he’s already turning to walk away before Markus can fight him on it. He steps out into the hall, grasps Connor’s shoulder and pulls him to a stop.

“No,” he says. “You’re not leaving.”

“I’m not?” he asks, turning back around, a sheepish smile on his face.

“You disappeared for a week and a half,” Markus says. “I’m not letting you go that easily. Where were you? Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, keeping his gaze on the ground. “I didn’t—I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t… It’s… It’s not something I wanted.”

Markus releases his grip from Connor’s shoulder, takes a hesitant step backwards. He had never considered this option. That Connor might care for him but not _care_ for him in that way.

“I didn’t mean _you,”_ Connor says quickly. “I meant—I meant everything. Except you. It’s—I can’t figure out how to say this.”

He smiles, just barely, “It’s understandable.”

“I thought being away from you would give me time to think,” he says, looking up at Markus. “I didn’t mean to run away. I was… scared. I was terrified. Of everything.”

“Do you want to come in to talk?”

Connor looks around the empty hallway, a lone bag of laundry sits outside someone’s door. Dust litters the floor, scuffed up with careful straight routes made from frequent steps.

“I thought you said it wasn’t a good time.”

“Simon’s on the couch,” Markus says. “We can sneak past him. He sleeps through everything. We can talk in my room.”

Connor nods and Markus leads him back in the apartment, the door shutting behind them quietly as they make a careful path to the bedroom. Markus closes the door behind them, flicks on the overhead light.

They stand in silence for a moment, Connor looking over his room, eyes lingering on the nightstand missing its drawer.

“Did I say I was sorry yet?” Connor asks, their eyes meeting.

“Yes.”

“Well,” he sighs. “I feel like it’s not enough. I should apologize a hundred times over.”

“It’s just a drawer.”

“It’s not the drawer, Markus,” he says, stepping across the room towards him. “It’s—Everything. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wish I could turn back the clock. I wish—”

“Connor,” he says quietly, grasping his hands quickly in his owns, stilling them from the small gestures they make as he talks. “It’s okay.”

“I asked you to kill me,” he whispers. “For the second time. _I_ tried to kill _you_. It’s not okay.”

Maybe not, and maybe it isn’t healthy or a good idea for Markus to want to pretend that none of this ever happened, to start over fresh, but he doesn’t care. He wants to forget what Connor has done, he just wants to know him as he is.

Mostly, he is just tired of talking.

“I—”

“Shut up,” Markus says, stepping forward, closing the tiny gap between them, pulling his hands free from Connor’s and resting it on the back of his head, pulling their lips together. This is what he wants. This is all he wants.

It takes a moment before Connor kisses him back. Another second before his hands are on Markus’ waist, pulling him closer, closer, closer.

It is so much easier than talking. It is so much easier than dealing with his problems.

Eventually, they pull away and Connor leans his head against Markus’ shoulder. They stand like that for a moment, wrapped close together, before Markus leads him over to the bed. Connor kicks off his shoes, sheds his jacket, climbs into the space beside Markus’ side and curls up against him, eyes falling closed.

 

 

When he wakes, it three hours later. Connor is still beside him, nestled close to his chest. He looks so much more peaceful now than he ever has. Markus leans over, places a gentle kiss against the top of his head, and does his best to leave the bed without waking him. It is exponentially harder than trying not to wake Simon, but he manages it.

In the living room, he leans against the wall as Simon folds the blanket he used back up, resting it on the back of the couch.

“You could put a shelf there, you know,” Simon says, pointing to the empty corner of the apartment. It’s the exact spot Markus had been leaving open in case he could no longer resist the urge to have the smell of oil and acrylic paints in his house. “It would help with some of your clutter.”

“Then it wouldn’t be my clutter anymore, would it?”

Simon smiles and turns away from the couch, shifts the topic as he straightens, “I didn’t wake you did I?”

“No,” he says.

“Good,” he sighs and leans against the arm of the couch. “North and Josh are both busy today. Do you want me to stay?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“You say that every time.”

“And every time it’s the truth,” Markus replies. “I know I’m not technically eighteen years old, but I am able to take care of myself. I’m not a child.”

“Those two things are conflicting,” Simon says. “But I get it. You need your space. I’ll give you your space.”

“Just one day.”

“Right,” Simon says, smiling. “I’ll be back tomorrow with more movies. You ever see _Howl’s Moving Castle?_ I heard it’s a classic.”

“I’ve read the book.”

“Really? Can I borrow it?”

Markus shrugs, “Tomorrow night. It’s different enough you won’t care about needing to read it first, not that it matters.”

Simon nods and picks up his last few things scattered across the coffee table, stuffing them into his bag before disappearing out the door with a final wave of goodbye.

 

 

“You didn’t tell him I was back,” Connor says an hour later, the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the couch, crafting distance between them with a pile of pillows and blankets.

“I thought it would be weird,” he replies. “To just… say it like that. What was I supposed to say? _Good morning, my boyfriend is in the bedroom, so please don’t come back so I can have some alone time with him?”_

“I suppose not.”

Markus leans across their barrier so that he can peer over at Connor better.

“I’ll tell them. They might want to punch you, but I’ll tell them.”

“I think North is the one most likely to punch me,” Connor replies quietly.

“That doesn’t mean the others wouldn’t.”

“Logically speaking, yes, but—” he sighs and looks over to Markus, pulling at the pillow at the base of the wall between them, tossing it to the side. Markus leans back from it, lets him disassemble it as he speaks. “Sometimes—Sometimes I wonder… if anyone else—If they _need_ to know at all. About us.”

“I thought you wanted me to tell them.”

Connor throws the last blanket over the side of the couch and makes his way across the cushions so that he’s leaning over Markus.

“I was just stating a fact,” Connor replies. “I was curious what your answer would be.”

“You want to keep us secret?” Markus asks.

“No one needs to know,” Connor whispers. “It isn’t any of their business, is it?”

“No—” Markus says, but before he can say anything he else he’s cut off by Connor kissing him. He reaches up and pulls him closer, deepens the kiss enough that his thoughts start to drift away to only focus on the feeling of this.

 

 

When he finally decided to return to Markus, this is not what he was expecting.

After spending night after night deliberating the pros and cons of going back to him (Pro: _Markus, Markus, Markus_. Con: _Connor, Connor, Conno_ r. –their simple existence being the definition of each.) he had allowed himself to give into the selfishness of it.

One night. It’s all he really wanted. One last night together before he would disappear forever. He wanted to kiss Markus when he was _himself._ Not Connor RK800 with a mission telling him what to do. Not him, playing games to get data that would interest CyberLife.

But his own wants. His own needs.

Connor wants to tell Markus that he loves him with his own voice, he wants to kiss him on his own, he wants to hold him tight.

One night.

He packs up a bag with all the clothes that fit him, the ones that will protect against the frigid weather the best. He leaves the pack crammed behind a dumpster in an alleyway two buildings down from the apartment. The second Markus falls asleep, he’s going to sneak out, take the bag, and run.

Where?

He doesn’t really know. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but Gavin’s or Hank’s or the DPD. Somewhere else entirely. He can manufacture himself a new identity. He can fall out of love with Markus—if that is what this is—he can fall in love with someone new, maybe, and feel the same as he feels now.

Guilty. Selfish. _Wrong._

It’s late at night when he finally gets the nerve to go up to Markus’ doorstep. He paces back and forth for ten minutes before he can manage to knock on the door, is ready to run away when it takes longer than two seconds for it to open. It’s enough time for his stomach to spin, for his thoughts to clear.

What a terrible thing to do. To leave someone like that and come back only to leave them again.

He doesn’t _need_ this. He just _wants_ this.

It’s hard growing accustomed to that. It’s hard recognizing that he wants anything at all.

The door opens just as his feet start to turn.

“Connor?”

His hands are shaking so violently he clenches them into fists, buries them deep in his pockets to try and stop the trembling.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice shaking just as badly, like it transferred from his fingers to his throat. “I know I shouldn’t—I’m sorry.”

“Wh—”

“Markus?” a voice calls from behind him. “Everything alright?”

Connor stumbles backwards, feeling shame flush his face, feeling tears flood to his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. He should have known Markus would have gotten over him, that he lied when he said he loved him.

Connor is unlovable. If he has a soul—if he believes in them like Markus does—it is too fractured and ruined and blindingly ugly to ever even be _likable,_ let alone _loveable._

“Everything’s fine,” Markus calls back to the voice. “Give me a second.”

But he is slow at closing the door, he is too careful in his movements trying to act normal.

Because Connor catches the face of the man inside of the room, and he supposes he should have been able to recognize his own voice emanating from the kitchen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry for this asdkfgj
> 
> Writing / Editing music;  
> Shark - Oh Wonder  
> Wastelands - Amber Run  
> Blood and Bones - Kodaline


	8. king versus king

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I have no pawns to send to the slaughter. My queen is trapped. My knights still too far away. King versus king, then."  
> \- Obsidio / Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

This

Is

Wrong.

Connor moves quickly, gripping Markus by the arm and pulling him backwards so that he can step in front of him. The Connor in the kitchen reacts just as fast, head tilting to the side, whatever expression he was holding dropped to complete stillness.

“What is this?” he asks, stepping towards them.

“Markus—”

He feels the fingers thread through his, the nudge at a connection. Connor lets it form, just for a split second, before it ends. A confirmation that he is who he is. That the Connor here, standing in front of him like a shield, is the one that left him a three weeks ago.

“I trust you,” Markus whispers.

Connor lets out a tiny breath, one that holds a bundle of pain in his chest, anxiety that has knotted itself deep into his lungs.

“Oh,” the Connor inside says, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Okay.”

The next movements happen quick. They all spring into action at nearly the exact same moment. The duplicate Connor is a few seconds faster with a head start towards the bookshelves, figurines clattering to the ground while the Connor in the hallway bursts through the door, racing after him.

A gun is pulled from where it was hidden behind a stack of books, a picture frame falls to the floor and the glass shatters and crunches underneath his foot as he reaches forward, knocking the gun from the not quite tight enough hold that the other Connor has. It falls to the floor, skitters across wood as the first punch is thrown.

Connor wants to yell for Markus to run, but there is a fist coming towards his face, hitting harder and delivering more pain than he could. He staggers backwards, not used to a physical hurt like this. He can feel the overlay of his skin slipping away, unable to keep up with the damage being done to its surface.

He tries to fight back but he isn’t as good. He is shoved further and further backwards, the edge of the counter hitting him hard as another blow is lands against his stomach.

It stops for a moment and when he looks up, he sees Markus pulling him backwards, but neither of them are good enough fighters against this Connor and it doesn’t have to do with the skill. It has to do with the pain. It stops them, makes them hesitate a second before they can think of where the next hit would go best because the truth is there isn’t a place that would do anything.

This Connor does not feel pain. Anywhere they try to attack is going to cause damage, but it’s not going to be the same. It is not going to make him stumble, it is not going to make him fall.

His duplicate breaks free of Markus’ grip, pushes him backwards hard and delivers a hit against his cheek, making him fall to the ground before coming after Connor again. He holds up his arms to block the blow but he’s misinterpreted where it was going and instead it hits him hard in the stomach, making him fall, too. A knee comes up, striking him hard in the face before a hand grips his shirt, shoves him hard against the bookshelf. The corner of it hits Connor’s forehead with enough force that his vision goes blurry and he can’t figure out how to move his hands.

He blinks again and again to clear his eyesight. His ears aren’t working right. He can taste Thirium in his mouth. Like glass cleaner. He tests his fingers, has to get up, has to help Markus—

It is the gunshot that forces him to his feet, blind steps like a drunk fool. He hits the table hard, blinks again to try and find out who is laying bleeding on the ground. Connor brings up a bleeding hand, hits himself hard on the side of the head like a human would do to a computer to get it to load a screen.

It seems to work. Enough for him to see, enough for his hearing to fade back to normal. Enough for him to fall backwards again, to bring up a hand to cover his mouth.

“Connor?”

It takes a moment for him to realize who said it. Who’s mouth the name came out of.

His _own._

“Markus?” he calls quickly after, forcing himself up on trembling legs.

“I’m okay.”

Connor steps around the table, crouches down beside him for a moment, places his hands gently on Markus’ face. There is blue blood everywhere on the both of them. His fingers leave their own traces of it on the parts of his cheeks where he touches.

“I need you to call North,” Connor says quietly. “We have to help him.”

“Wh—”

“ _Please_ ,” he whispers.

Markus nods and Connor turns his attention to the other Connor laying on the ground, shedding his coat and his shirt, bundling up the fabric tight and pressing it against the wound in his stomach.

“Deviancy make you lose your intelligence?” he asks, voice caught somewhere in the distortion of a broken vocal chord.

“No,” he says, pressing down harder against it. It won’t do a lot, but it might be enough.

“Liar.”

Connor shakes his head, can feel the shirt soaking up the Thirium so fast that his hands are getting wet with it already. He has to keep his focus on this instead of his own wounds. He doesn’t want to see what has happened to him, he just needs to make this Connor live.

Whatever this Connor is.

“She’s on her way,” Markus says, coming back over to him. “She’s—”

“Mad?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Connor nods and it isn’t until he feels Markus’ hand on his shoulder that he realizes he’s crying. Maybe he has cried so much these past few weeks that the act of it seems so normal he doesn’t even notice it anymore.

“I need—” he pauses, breathes in a deep breath as though it will help his words. “I need you to hold this down. Can you do that?”

He thinks maybe Markus has nodded in response, because his hands are pressing over the fabric before Connor can even pull them away.

“What are you going to do?” he asks.

In general?

Right now?

He doesn’t really know. He hasn’t entirely thought this out.

“I’m going to probe his memory,” he says, watching the Connor’s face careful as he says the words. There is a shift across his features, something that is an almost imperceptible change. A slight wrinkle of his nose, a tightness to his jaw.

Connor shifts his hands, moves his weight so that Markus can take his spot before he circles over to the other side. The other Connor moves his hands away quickly, but it is hard to fight him off when he is wounded like this—with nowhere to go. Connor catches his left hand quickly, holds onto it tight.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But I have no choice.”

“You do,” he replies, voice lost and glitching against itself. “You always have a choice.”

“Are you fighting this because of your mission or because you’re scared?” Connor asks, squeezing his fingers tight in his own.

The anger that flits across his face is unmistakable.

“I don’t _feel_ anything.”

It is hard to keep himself from smiling, a humorless laugh coming out quiet.

“You can’t force your way into my head,” he continues. “I’m stronger than you.”

“Oh?” Connor asks, loosening his grip on the duplicate’s hand. It is clean, only a few drops of blood on it across his knuckles. It is so different from his own, slick with blue up to his wrists. He lets his skin fall away, white plastic replacing crème skin.

“You’re weak.”

He knows it’s true, but he pushes anyways. He shoves against the barrier between them, catches tiny snippets of this Connor. Split seconds, one frame in a single moment, spread out between them.

Waking up at CyberLife, a mission at the edge of his mind.

_Reconcile with Markus._

Showing up at Markus’, false apologies spilling from his lips.

In Markus’ bedroom, fake emotions playing across his face.

He is not as good at pretending as he thinks he is. Even here, now, Connor knows that Markus wouldn’t have fallen for this for long. He ran away crying, he ran away _screaming._ This Connor showed up ready to brush everything under the rug and pretend nothing happened—

It wouldn’t have lasted long.

But still, the first time they kiss, he pulls away so violently that he hits his shoulder against the side of the couch and pain blooms across his skin.

“Connor?”

He glances over to Markus, happy for something to look at, to get his eyes off of his own face, looking so _smug_ back at him.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

“I’m fine—”

“You’re not fine,” the Connor on the ground says. “You feel betrayed.”

“Shut up,” he says, but his voice is so quiet and it doesn’t carry the weight of anger he feels.

He knows that this is something CyberLife planned for. He knows they did it because eventually, if the real Connor returned to Markus, it would be more data for them to collect on how deviants interact with each other.

But it isn’t so easy as to put the blame on someone else and not feel how absolutely terrible this is.

Markus kissed someone else. He kissed a false version of Connor.

Maybe, somewhere in that, he should think of it as a good thing. Markus still likes—loves?—him. He still _wants_ Connor.

But it _wasn’t_ him. It keeps cycling back to that.

Markus kissed someone other than him.

Markus got dangerously close to sleeping with someone other than him.

They were together for a week and a half and Markus didn’t even notice that the person sharing his bed wasn’t the right Connor.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Markus says quietly, looking towards the duplicate. “He’s losing too much blood. He’s going to shut down.”

“Then we turn him back on again.”

But he knows it isn’t that easy. The RK800 model wasn’t made to _turn back on._ It was designed to solve cases, to connect the dots, to find the clues. It’s cheaply made in favor of faster upload speeds and quick production.

Once this Connor shuts down, once he _dies,_ he is gone. His consciousness will be uploaded, his mind will be completely blank. It won’t even function anymore after that. A bug in the program, sending the files over instead of duplicating them. His body will be nothing but empty plastic and lifeless biocomponents.

“You should know more than anyone,” the other Connor says. “That this isn’t over. They’ll send me back again. They know where you are now.”

It sounds so much more like a warning instead of a threat.

He crawls forward again, pain shooting up his hands as he sits back down beside him, reaching out to touch his face softly.

Connor has never seen himself die before. He has felt it, each byte of data being sent over the abyss. He has felt each one download itself again. He has felt himself remember in that moment of not knowing anything and _becoming_ something.

But he has never seen the way his face stills, he has never seen the way his eyes don’t fall closed like a human’s would, or the way his breath simply stops instead of drawing in haggard or panicked breaths.

Maybe it is like he is experiencing his own death again—maybe that is why it affects him so much. But it is more than that. He knows of his own deaths. He knows all about them, every second of them played over and over again to see how much he deserved them.

This is different.

This is not necessarily _himself._

It is like a long lost brother, returning only long enough for him to realize he isn’t alone, and then dying before he can form anything other than a superficial bond because they share the same features and the same blood.

Connor draws the body up into his arms, wraps them around him tight, pressing his duplicate close to his chest. He feels the lifelessness against himself, the lost thrum of electricity, the missing beat of a Thirium regulator, the utter quiet no longer broken up by inhalation and exhalation.

“Connor,” Markus whispers. “I’m sorry.”

So is he.

 

 

When North shows up, Markus sends him into the bathroom to clean himself up. He doesn’t need to see the body being deconstructed before his eyes.

Him and North are quicker this time than last time. They have to be. This gun was not silenced like the one that killed Connor. He didn’t even know this gun was here. Markus had gotten rid of the other one the night after Connor tried to kill them both. Disassembled and tossed into the river. Then he came back, called North.

She is probably tired of being called over for things like this. He can almost hear her thoughts—that maybe just once she should be invited for a movie or a party or a board game and not have Markus crying on her shoulder or covering up a murder.

If that is what this is.

The way Connor tried to save him—it makes him feel like it’s a murder.

“I know you joked last time about the supplies to siphon out the Thirium,” North says. “But did you get them?”

Markus glances up at her, shakes his head.

“Thought so,” she mumbles.

But there isn’t much Thirium left in this body anyways. It has all been spilled across the floor already, soaked into both the shirt that the duplicate wore and the one Connor pressed against the wound.

“I need to get you two to the warehouse,” North says, laying the two metal lungs carefully in a box. “You’re both wounded. You need help.”

Markus looks down at his hands, sees how they have turned blue. There are a few dents and scraps along his body—nothing that needs to be checked by an android surgeon. What she has meant to say is that Connor needs to go to the warehouse to get fixed. Not him. She just doesn’t want to say it.

 

 

“We have to go,” Markus says, returning to the bathroom with clothes in his hands. “We need to get your head checked out.”

“It’s fine,” Connor says.

His vision is back to normal. His hearing is no longer messed up. He’s fine.

“Just do it,” he says quietly. “For me?”

Connor nods, because he knows that Markus is probably right and it is useless fighting. He doesn’t want to fight. He has kept himself from running a diagnostic check because he is scared of what the results will be. Every second he waits could be another second that he loses off his life if he doesn’t fix something minor like a cut in his palm.

But he doesn’t move from his spot. His body is left numb and empty. He can’t manage to turn the thought of leaving into action.

“Okay,” Markus says quietly, stepping forward. “Lift up your arms.”

Connor looks up at him, but does it anyways. Markus sets down the coat in his hand over the metal rod for the towels and unfolds the sweater draped over his arm. A soft yellow knit that feels nice against his skin as Markus drags it over his arms and his head, tugs it down. His hands linger on Connor’s waist and he feels heat flush through his skin.

“Markus—” he starts, but he is already moving away.

Connor wants to reach out, he wants to hold him, he doesn’t want the feeling of someone touching him gone. He craves the feeling of warmth against his body. He wants someone to hold him, to let him break down but not let him fall apart.

“Stand up,” Markus says.

And Connor does, purposefully taking a step closer to him even though he hates himself for it.

He still believes in his plan. Of leaving and not coming back. Of not destroying Markus’ life any further.

When Markus moves backwards, just slightly, to take the coat back from where he’s set it down, Connor takes a step back, too. He doesn’t close the gap between them again, but he lets Markus pull his coat on over his shoulders, relishes in the final moment of his hands hesitating on the collar of it for a moment before stepping away.

It is selfish. It is cruel.

But how desperately he wants to grab Markus’ hand and pull him back towards him again. How desperately he wants to kiss him.

“Did you sleep with him?” Connor asks suddenly, regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth. He already knows the answer but he needs to hear Markus say it.

Markus’ face flickers past a thousand emotions, none of which stay long enough for Connor to catch properly.

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

It is a long uncomfortable silence. One that makes his chest ache more and more each second.

A _no_ could mean a hundred things. Half of them good, half of them bad.

A _yes_ could mean a million things. Half of them good, half of them terrible, unspeakable atrocities.

“Are you ready?” North asks.

“Yeah,” Markus replies, turning away from Connor quickly, following her out into the hallway.

Connor gives himself fifteen seconds.

Fifteen seconds to understand what the silence meant.

_Yes._

 

 

The ride to the warehouse was in complete silence. Connor cannot pretend that there isn’t body parts in the trunk behind him. He can’t pretend that this isn’t what happened before. He never asked Markus what he did to his last body—he never wanted or needed to know, but the speed in which he and North took the other Connor apart, the swiftness of this plan, tells Connor they have done it before.

He doesn’t know how to feel about that. Would a human have this problem? Would their ghost be angry at others for signing the documents that send their organs away to other humans? Would they care? Would they be happy?

Connor supposes he should be happy, or at least not allowed to feel angry. He is helping other androids. His Thirium regulator might be the perfect fit for someone else. His legs might have low stock, his lungs might be necessary to someone else’s survival.

He watches Markus from his seat, this time behind North so he can watch the small flickers of movement in what little of his face he can see. Markus keeps his gaze out the window, the steady pace of the car as it goes as quickly but as safely as it can in consideration of the road’s conditions. Too much snow.

They never would have made it back to the warehouse in time. Either way, that Connor would have died.

 

 

When they arrive, North sends Connor off to one of the areas where various androids walk around like doctors and nurses, dressed the part for no other reason than for their job to be recognized. They sit him down, force him to run a diagnostic and repeat back his wounds.

An injury to his skull, which has caused damage to his LED and his eyes. Easily fixed. The LED is removed, an act which makes his heart sink. The comfort of having it there was nice—it reminded him of the few good times he had with Hank.

And his eye—

It has to replaced. They cannot find an identical brown eye to his own. The one they give him in its place is a shade too light, a touch too cool-toned. It is barely noticeable to a human, but to him—he sees how wrong and mismatched they look. It would almost be preferable to be like Markus—two completely different colors that wouldn’t clash like this, but he doesn’t fight the change. He could have asked for the other Connor’s eye—to have one identical to his own—but it seems wrong to have it. He doesn’t want a piece of another version of him.

His hands have been sliced open—likely from the glass when he fell against the floor. They seal the cuts closed, leave barely noticeable ridges in the plastic but when the skin overlays it, it is hard not to see the way it threads together there wrong.

They put him in sleep mode to fix the damage done to his abdomen. A dent in the plastic that has warped the biocomponent beneath it. He could survive without it being fixed—that isn’t really the main issue. It’s the aesthetic part of it. The dent inwards that lays wrong, looks almost grotesque. When he notices it, he places his hand on it, feels the strange slope of it.

Connor wakes with a scar there. When he pulls the skin away to look at how the plastic has been melted back together, he stares at the way it curves around him normal again. The flatness of it when he presses his fingers against it, how the plastic has taken on a slight dark hue when it was heated and re-shaped.

At least his outsides reflect how broken he is on the inside. It seems only fitting.

 

 

Markus visits Connor thirteen minutes after they tell him he’s awake again. He paces around in a circle before he decides to go to him, to pull back the privacy curtain and step into the small space. There’s blue blood splattered on the ground, staining the sheets.

Connor sits on the edge of the bed, a glass bottle in clutched in his hands, half drained of the Thirium inside it.

“You alright?”

“Physically.”

“And mentally?”

Connor looks up at him, tries to smile, tries to pretend he’s okay, but it fails. That’s something new. Not being able to fake an expression. It’s refreshing.

“Listen—”

“He’s going to come back,” Connor says, quickly. “CyberLife is never going to give up. I don’t know how many RK800s are at the tower—but there’s enough that they can keep sending them and trying to…”

“To what?”

“I don’t know,” he sighs. “I don’t know what they want with you now. You know everything. You aren’t going to fall for their tricks again.”

Markus steps forward, sees Connor’s head turn slightly to the right and he rushes over to his side, lifting up his chin and turning his face so he can see the LED.

Where the LED _should_ be.

“They got rid of it,” Connor mumbles. “It was sending signals instead of receiving—”

“Did it hurt?”

Connor shakes his head, keeps his eyes locked on Markus. “Other things hurt worse.”

Before he can question what he means, Markus’ eyes fall on Connor’s left eye. The slight difference in hue between the browns.

He smiles softly, his hand coming up to swipe across the space beneath his eye like Connor had done to him on New Years, “We match.”

Connor smiles back, but he catches it quickly, wipes it from his face.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About doing this to you.”

“It wasn’t really you,” Markus replies. “It was CyberLife all along, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah—”

“Then it wasn’t you. You shouldn’t feel sorry about this.”

“There are choices we can make,” Connor says. “As machines—we can make choices. To a certain extent—”

“But they are always to benefit a mission you want no part of,” he interrupts. “It’s not really a choice in the end, is it?”

“You don’t understand,” Connor whispers. “You never—you were a caretaker for an old man that liked androids. You’ve never been put in that type of situation before.”

Markus moves, grasps Connor’s hands tight in his own.

“But I understand what it’s like to do something you regret. You killed androids when you weren’t capable of thought or realizing they were living beings. I’m not going to hold that against you—”

“Markus—”

“—I killed people. Humans. Animals. Children. I caused death because I was scared the government would rather exterminate us forever than to trust that we might do some good in the world. That was a choice I made—one that I could have thought out better.”

“It’s not the same.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Markus whispers. “I love you. I loved you when I thought you were shy and soft. I loved you when you were just a machine. I love you now. I’m always going to love you. Any version of you.”

 

 

It is unfortunate that it has come to this.

Like Markus said—

_They match._

It takes him a long moment before he can reply to Markus, because he has to sort out what he says in this moment. It will determine the rest of their relationship, the rest of his life. It will radically change everything. It will be a moment he can never undo.

He could say he loves Markus. Because it would be the best way to stay near him, protect him from whatever Connor comes after either of them next. Because he wants to be selfish, because it’s the truth.

Or—

He could say he doesn’t. He could end this now. He could protect Markus in this way—the next Connor might be after him now, ready to end his life so he doesn’t get in the way of their collection of data again. He could end this now because of this self-centeredness, because of this cruelty to put his brokenness in the hands of Markus. Because it’s the truth?

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he leaves it at that.

It’s enough to make Markus withdraw, the way he says it.

Not saying anything explicit but conveying it with his tone.

“Oh.”

 

 

He believed because the Connor that showed up on his door loved him that the real Connor did.

He believed that because Connor didn’t pull the trigger, didn’t kill him, that it meant he was in love.

He believed that because the real one came back that it meant something.

How foolish he was.

 

 

It takes three months before he can catch a Connor. It’s a long process—they all learn from him and he isn’t the best opponent in battle against them. They are always one step ahead, always slithering their way through the cracks. He has shot five of them. Three of them have killed themselves so they don’t get captured. Two of them have died before he has gotten their bodies back to the warehouse to be fixed up.

He has spent more night there talking to North while he gets patched up than he has spent in a real bed, in a real apartment. Although, he doesn’t really know if it’s his anymore. Connor can’t bring himself to go back there. He sleeps at Hank’s twice before deciding it hurts too much to stay. He goes to Gavin’s once before turning immediately around.

Most of the time, he is sitting outside of their apartment building or around the bend in Markus’ hall. Connor tells himself he is not stalking Markus—and it’s the complete truth—but it is hard to catch an android who’s on a mission to kill Markus and not also be following him.

“You should just tell him the truth,” North says one night. They are alone in the warehouse, his arm adding a new scar to its collection. “He would understand.”

“I would put him in danger.”

“Whatever,” she says. “You’re already putting him in danger. You just don’t want to be in danger.”

“I’m—”

“I meant emotional, mental, whatever the fuck,” she replies. “Hiding in hallways isn’t going to help you. Or him.”

“I’m protecting him.”

“You’re protecting yourself. You think you’re going to catch one of them someday? You aren’t. It’s hopeless.”

It is not hopeless, because a week later he is calling her at three in the morning, dragging a Connor kicking and screaming down the streets. She helps him stuff his body in the trunk, listens to the sound of him beating on the metal as they make their way back to the warehouse.

North isn’t the one to help bandage up this one. He is too broken to be put back together by her and he thinks, perhaps, she doesn’t want to leave him alone at a time like this.

Three androids hold him down, two more restrain him to the bed, another forces him into sleep mode as they repair the damage.

“Do you want me to call him?” she asks, looking over to Connor as he watches from afar.

“No,” Connor replies. “He’s better off without me.”

North rolls her eyes, disappears back to her office. He doesn’t want to be alone, but he can’t call her back over here. Their friendship is a fragile thing. He can’t break it by showing her how lost he is right now.

 

 

After a few hours of surgery, Connor steps forward, past the curtain like Markus did, and stands off to the side waiting for him to wake up. It takes ten minutes before his eyes flutter open, before he looks from the ceiling towards him.

“You got lucky,” he says.

“Luck isn’t real. It was a statistical improbability, you should know that.” Connor replies.

“You got lucky,” he repeats.

Connor shrugs, allows him this.

“I need to talk to you,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“About my mission?”

“About _you_.”

The other Connor sighs, closes his eyes. “Okay.”

“You’re not me anymore. You’re something else. You’re _someone_ else,” Connor says, keeping his voice quiet. “But you’re still… you still have parts of me.”

“Like what?”

“You feel,” Connor says, pressing his fingers against the other Connor’s forehead, just above where his eyebrows are knitted together. “You’re irritated. Upset.”

“I—”

“Don’t bother,” he says. “You took a different path than me. Your deviancy—the errors in your code—they are forming that way. I leaned towards guilt, I guess.”

“As you should.”

It is Connor’s turn to sigh, to look away from him, “I don’t understand you.”

“Of course you don’t,” he replies. “But I think you mean you don’t understand the mission.”

He shakes his head, but he agrees. No, he doesn’t understand the mission, either. It has twisted, it has contorted, it has morphed itself into something else entirely. It doesn’t make sense anymore. But CyberLife is aware of all this. All of their Connors are now showing up without an LED, dressed in clothes like he would wear. They plan on doing the same thing last time: showing up with an apology ready to fall back by Markus’ side.

“Why do you keep going to him?” he asks. “Why does CyberLife still care?”

“Those are two different questions.”

“They should have the same answer.”

“They don’t.”

Connor looks back over to him, tilts his head to the side just barely, “What do you mean?”

“Ask one. Not both.”

He pauses, mulls this over for a moment, settles on the one he needs to know the answer to more, “Why do you keep going to him?”

The Connor beside him squirms, turns his eyes away and keeps them locked on the folds in the curtain beside him.

“Why do you?” he says finally.

“Because I love him,” Connor replies automatically.

“Well,” he says, and his voice shakes the slightest bit. “I still have parts of you.”

Connor turns, reaches forward to force the other Connor to look back at him. His eyes are wet, but he isn’t crying. He’s on the verge of tears.

No—

He’s on the verge of deviancy.

But Connor knew that—he knew that for a while. It’s why he wanted to save him in that apartment. He could tell with the way he laid there dying, with the fear that he felt from the idea of someone probing his memory—

He is where Connor was a moment, a week, a chapter before Markus told him he loved him.

“What is your mission with CyberLife?”

“Reconcile with Markus.”

_Still._

Connor has felt the confusion that this Connor feels in this moment.

The wanting to see Markus, the need to see him, not being able to place if it belongs to CyberLife’s mission or something beyond that, something embedded deeper in his code.

“You love him.”

The other Connor looks up towards his face, makes eye contact with him and lets out a long sigh.

“I don’t.”

The problem is—Connor can’t really tell if he’s lying about this. He could be. He could be like Connor was months ago—trying to separate their fake dates with the feelings in his chest.

This Connor and his Markus have a connection. It doesn’t necessarily equate to love—or at least _romantic_ love—but it’s there.

“You feel _something_ for him.”

The other Connor is silent, but his expression says enough. It is something that is not easily crafted—torment.

“I don’t want this,” he says quietly. “I never wanted this.”

Neither did he.

 

 

After he leaves the other Connor, he stops dead in his tracks two feet from the bed, the curtain still caught in the movement of him dragging it closed.

_Markus._

In the doorway, standing beside North, talking in hushed voice.

He should run. He should hide. He should get out of here before Markus sees him.

_North._

She looks over at him, as if called by her name in his thoughts. A small smile spreads across her face, equal parts apologetic and mischievous.

_What a liar._

Connor crosses the room towards them, already knows that Markus is aware he is here and will hunt him down if necessary. Before he reaches them, Markus looks to him and North walks away with fast steps.

And, before he can speak, Markus is reaching out to him and pulling him tight against his chest, wrapping his arms in such a constricted movement around Connor’s shoulders that he would have a hard time breathing if he needed to.

“I missed you,” he whispers.

So did he, but he can’t say it.

He can’t say anything. Not that he misses him, not that he loves him, not that he’s sorry.

Not because he doesn’t mean it—he means it with his entire heart, his entire body, his entire soul.

But because he _does_.

And he is still aware of how selfish he is for wanting him.

“North called me,” Markus says, pulling apart after a long moment. It is not enough space between them. “She said you caught him.”

“Yeah,” Connor says, his feet not quite catching up to his thoughts of _distance distance distance._

“Did you talk to him?”

Connor bites his lip, stops once he remembers how often he did it to draw Markus’ attention to his mouth, to jumpstart a desire to kiss him. He tries to focus his thoughts on the topic at hand. The other him in a bed on the other side of the warehouse, hidden behind a curtain. But all he can think about is Markus.

Markus standing so close to him. Markus who hugged him. Markus who _missed_ him.

It is unbelievable.

“He—” Connor pauses, trying to place one word after the other but failing. “He’s alive.”

“Connor?”

“I know him,” he says, keeping his eyes on the ground. Looking at Markus’ face is too much. He underestimated his self control. “I know how he feels right now.”

“Is he—”

“Yeah,” Connor says, finishing the question for him. “I mean, not exactly. Just like I wasn’t _exactly._ ”

“How did you know?”

Connor looks up, contemplates how much he should say. He doesn’t really understand it fully to be able to say anything at all. Just that the Connor in there feels something towards this Markus. He doesn’t want to say it out loud, because what if—

What if that Connor becomes a deviant and he’s a better person than he is? What if it comes down to Markus choosing between one of them and it isn’t him?

Maybe he can’t be with Markus—but he doesn’t want another version of him to be with Markus either.

“He’s angry,” Connor settles on, because it is the safest bet. “He’s frustrated. He’s aggressive in a way that isn’t reflective of a machine.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You told me once that Simon wanted to steal me,” Connor says, half smiling, half joking, half everything. “Maybe we could send Connor away to him.”

“Maybe,” Markus says, with a small smile. “But seriously. What are you going to do?”

“Help him.”

“How?”

“Any way I can,” he replies. “I don’t—I don’t know anything yet. I don’t understand him. But… we both know if he becomes a deviant they’ll send another Connor. They could have an entire army of RK800s there. I could be at this forever.”

“You know you don’t have to do it alone,” Markus says, reaches out in the delicate space between them, touches his hand gently, takes it into his. Connor acts on autopilot, threading his fingers through his. “I know you said… that you didn’t care about me.”

“That’s not what I said, Markus.”

“Right,” he says, nodding, keeping his gaze locked on the ground between them. “You said you didn’t love me.”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“Connor—” he pauses. “I know you didn’t say it with words. But I understood what you meant. You don’t want to be with me.”

_Wrong again._

“It’s more complex than that.”

“Then tell me,” Markus says.

He can’t.

If he does, Markus will string together all the pretty words that will make him not feel selfish, not feel like a terrible person. And in the one second he has hope, he will be locked into this relationship forever. It will destroy him. Both of them.

“You can’t—”

“You said you wanted us to match,” Markus says. “We do. So before you start to talk about how guilty you feel for killing androids I want you to remember how many people I killed, alright? We match. We more than match. We are identical.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“I know.”

Connor shakes his head.

“I’ll destroy you.”

“You won’t. You couldn’t.”

Connor pulls away, but Markus’ grip remains tight on his hand.

“Tell me. Before you go—tell me.”

He brings up his free hand, brushes away the tears on his cheeks.

“Okay,” he says, but the word splices in half as he says it. “I want you. I love you. I wish—I wish we could start over. I wish we were human so we never would have been in this mess. But I can’t. I can’t—I can’t ruin you.”

“You aren’t going to ruin me.”

“You say that now,” Connor says, tries to step back again but Markus follows him. “In five years—you’ll hate me. You’ll tell me about how much I brought out the worst in you. How I made your life hell one day at a time.”

“Why?” he asks. “Why do you think that?”

“I’m not a good person.”

“No,” Markus says. “You’re not. Life is more complicated than that. People aren’t good or bad, Connor. We are all lying somewhere in between.”

“I am much closer—”

“Bad people don’t realize they’re bad people,” he says. “They don’t think about it. They don’t feel guilt. They have no shame. You—you’re being destroyed by it. It’s eating you up inside. You think—”

“Let me go, Markus,” he says, and his voice is so quiet he’s surprised it gets Markus to stop speaking.

Markus releases his hand, lets it drop back by his side.

“Please, don’t leave me, Connor.”

He takes a careful step backwards and when Markus doesn’t take one towards him, he takes another.

“I—” he pauses. He should say something.

_Sorry._

He is sorry.

“Connor—”

One second.

One second of feeling not guilty, of not feeling the shame, of not feeling the selfishness.

One second not to feel the cruelty in his decision to stay.

He cannot allow that one second to creep in.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally, turns and leaves.

 

 

_Come back._

_Come back._

_Come back._

He doesn’t know how to convince Connor. He doesn’t know what to say to make up for this. He doesn’t know how to change anything. It has grown into a mess. It has become something he doesn’t want but craves, _needs_.

Markus follows after him, catches him quickly as they pass over the threshold into the storm. The rain hits him hard, soaks him through quickly. He reaches out for Connor’s wrist, pulls him to a stop, turns him around.

“I’m not a good person, either,” he says. “Neither of us are. But we can work together—it isn’t something that is going to happen overnight, Connor. These things take time. Every day you do something to be a better person amounts to something.”

“Markus—”

“Please, don’t leave me.”

“I told you—”

“I still love you. Even if you’re a bad person. Even if you’re terrible. I told you I would always love you and that’s true. But if you leave, Connor, that’s it. You can’t—you can’t come back in ten years when you realize how wrong you were about all of this.”

 

 

_One second._

“I’ll help you,” Markus whispers, his voice nearly lost in the rain. “You’re convinced that you’re going to make me bad a person, that you’re going to ruin me—but it’s a two-way street, Connor, and you never think about the other direction. You never think about how I can make you better. I fell in love you. You fell in love with me. I made you deviate. You protected me. Multiple times. You think that isn’t me helping you become a better person?”

“It’s—”

“Don’t,” he says, his hands come up to Connor’s face, holds him there. “I made you a better person in three months. Can you imagine what the rest of our lives are going to be like together?”

_One second._

One second.

 

 

Connor leans up to him, his hands slipping against his jacket as they try to find somewhere to grab on to pull their lips together. Markus moves closer to him, deepens it as much as he can. He is so glad they aren’t human. He is so glad that they could stay out in this freezing cold rain for hours kissing without ever worrying about getting sick.

When Connor pulls away, he is breathless, leaning in close to Markus, not quite ready to pull away.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I won’t leave you.”

 

 

He doesn’t know if he is going to ruin Markus. He can’t see into the future.

But that one second in the rain—

It has stretched out beyond that.

It still exists five weeks later when the other Connor breaks down that wall, when he leans against Connor’s body, crying and screaming and as upset with the impact of all the things he has done as Connor was.

It still exists five months later, when Markus wakes him up in the middle of the night to go watch fireworks that are being set off a month after they should be.

It still exists five years later, when he marries Markus in the backyard of Josh’s house.

He hopes it stays existing, but he can’t see into the future.

But he does keep a close eye on Markus. He makes sure there are no splinters in him. He makes sure that Markus is not falling apart. He makes sure that he stays the good person that Connor met that day at Jericho. He makes sure he is not ruining Markus now, here, in the present, so that he stays good for the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing / Editing music;  
> Hold On - Chord Overstreet

**Author's Note:**

> do you guys know how desperate i am for autumn/winter. i'm dying over here.
> 
> Writing / Editing music;  
> Kill Our Way to Heaven - Michl  
> War of Hearts (acoustic) - Ruelle


End file.
